The Annotated Bibliography is designed to familiarize you with MLA Works Cited format and to give you the opportunity to read and engage with various secondary sources before you integrate secondary research into your project.
Below you will find a list of objectives for the assignment. Be sure to follow the directions carefully. Follow all MLA guidelines on style—including headers, headings, double-spacing, 12-point font, 1” margins, etc. See Purdue Owl for further details:
• On general page formatting: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
• On Works Cited pages in particular:https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/
Procedure:
● Findthree or four secondary sources that are timely, useful, credible, and relevant to your primary source. Your work with these sources should help you revise and extend the preliminary thoughts you expressed in your exploratory draft. Use your research question(s) to guide you!
● At least one of your sources should be from a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal. We will discuss what this means in class, but in general, try to find sources using Project Muse, Academic Search Complete, or JSTOR (see links on Carmen under “Websites.”
● Correctly use MLA Works Cited list format.
● Explain the central argument(s) of the sources.
● Describe therelevance of your chosen sources to your main argument/interest in your paper. Why did you choose these articles/books?
Details:
1. For each source, create a correctly formatted Works Cited entry in MLA style. See the MLA Handbook or the Purdue OWL (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/) for details.
2. After each entry, write a paragraph of at least 4-5 sentences that includes:
a. A description of the source (where it comes from, who wrote it, how a reader might determine its reliability, etc.).
b. A summary of the author’s main argument(s).
c. An explanation of how the source relates to your argument. You might explain how this source supports, complicates, or disagrees with your claims/ideas, or you may describe which aspects of the source’s argument relate to your perspective on your primary source.
d. Revisit your reading in Who Says?(particularlythe sections below) to help you craft credible summaries of these sources (what does your article say?) AND to situate your views in conversation with those sources (what is it you want to say?).
a. pp. 59-66: How to determine reliable sources
b. pp. 68-84: Finding and working with sources
c. pp. 17-28: How to talk about sources without plagiarizing
d. pp. 88-96: How to summarize, paraphrase, and quote. There is also a complete handout guide to using quotations—how to handle short and long quotations, how to omit words from a quotation, etc.—on Carmen under “Student Resources.”