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To fulfill the research obligation of ENGL 2132, you will write an annotated bibliography on a writer, on a single work, or on a topic that embraces several writers, works, or literary subjects. Don’t be frightened by the fancy name. All we mean by an annotation is a summary.
The topic of your annotated bibliography may address ANY subject matter concerning the development of American literature after 1865.
If you are stuck for an idea, consider again the question, “What is literature?” See if any of those approaches, applied to something that interests you in your reading, could help you generate a Main Point.
As soon as possible you should immerse yourself in as much of the material covering this broad topic you have chosen, working to generate a coherent idea that unifies the material. From this idea, develop a Main Point (at least a working point) that can direct your research.
While your Main Point might (and probably should) change over the course of writing the paper, you need to have a working point before you even begin research so that the point can direct the selection of your sources. (You need to be discriminating in this selection to find the best sources for your paper, not simply sources vaguely related to the subject.)
When you have done that, you are ready to narrow the focus of your research. You are required to select and to annotate seven to ten secondary sources (books and periodicals). ONLY ONE of these may be primarily biographical. The selection of these sources should be dictated by and should be justified by your Introduction and Main Point.
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PLEASE NOTE, this work is to be conducted using university-level, scholarly research material. This means you must understand how to use Galileo to find such information (unless you live near a major research library). Consult the Online Tutorial for Galileo, understanding that the MLA Bibliography is, generally speaking, the most important database for literary-based studies. Please understand the difference between a scholarly journal and a general magazine, and understand the difference between a database accessed via the internet and a purely internet source. IF YOU SIMPLY SLAP TOGETHER SEVEN INTERNET SOURCES VAGUELY RELATED TO A GIVEN SUBJECT, YOU WILL FAIL THIS ASSIGNMENT. IF YOU USE MASTERPLOTS, WIKIPEDIA OR SPARK NOTES-TYPE SOURCES OR ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRIES (WHETHER ONLINE OR IN PRINT), YOU WILL FAIL THIS ASSIGNMENT.
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As you read each of these sources, compile a bibliographic entry and a series of notes summarizing the points made by the writer. (Consult accompanying file for the sample format of an annotated bibliography.) You must write an Introduction and Main Point to control your research, but you will NOT write a complete research paper.**
* You may refer here or to the course schedule for the due date of your annotated bibliography.
** A sample Annotated Bibliography will be sent to you via the course’s Announcements.
HOW TO WRITE AN EFFECTIVE ANNOTATION
Read the pieces of criticism (either from book-length works or from journals) and choose those that you find most valuable to your project. Select at least seven of these and write an annotation (summary) of each using your own words. The standard rule in technical writing for writing an annotation or abstract is to reduce the original to one-fifth to one-twentieth. In this case, less is generally better; so roughly speaking, a ten-page article should yield a half-page to one-page annotation. The easiest way to write these annotations is get a hard copy of the original source and highlight what you see to be the writer’s major points. Then, simply go back and paraphrase the highlighted portions.
