Mini Annotated Bibliography

Purpose:

For your final paper, you will be required to use 2 outside sources, one of which must be from a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. But when doing research, we can’t just use the first sources we find. We may have to read and think about several sources to build the conversation around the subject.

In this activity, you will create a mini annotated bibliography using 3 sources, one of which must be from a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal. In many courses in your college career, you may be asked to write an annotated bibliography. Annotated bibliographies help you sort out the conversation about your subject. They are a way to summarize and then evaluate whether a source is relevant to your paper. They also help you build your paper when it comes time to write.Task:

1. Create a new Word document.
2. State your working thesis.
3. Find three sources that address the topic you are studying. One must be from a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
4. Cite each source in APA citation style. Please see the sections on APA style in the Writing Skills Handbook or on the APA page on the LibGuide.
5. Choose two quotes from each source that might be useful in your paper and write them down. The quotes may be as short as a sentence or as long as a paragraph. Copy and paste your two quotes into your Word document. You will have time to be more selective in the paper itself.
6. For each source (with its corresponding pair of quotes), explain how the source fits in the conversation and how you might use it to support your claims (100 words minimum).

Criteria for Success

Follow the instructions above for full credit. Here is an example that you can copy for each source:

Thesis: “Writing classes in high school do not prepare students for college-level writing because they do not put writing assignments in the context of larger conversations.”

Source #1: Bartholomae, D. (1986). Inventing the university. Journal of Basic Writing, 5(1), 4-23.

Quote #1: “Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion–invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (Bartholomae, 1986, p. 1).

Quote #2: “There is, to be sure, an important distinction to be made between learning history, say, and learning to write as a historian” (Bartholomae, 1986, p. 5).

Evaluative Annotation:

This source will be vital in my argument because it was the critical article that recognized the need for students to understand that they are entering academic conversations in college-level writing. It establishes that college-level writers are learning the specific discourse patterns of their fields. This shift in theory, I will postulate, has still yet to trickle down to high school-level pedagogy. This article provides the theoretical backing that supports my entire argument.