Writing Homework Help

The Annotated Bibliography

At the end of your Primary Source Analysis, you posed 1-3 tentative, open-ended research questions. Now, your task is to investigate those questions by using the OSU Library to locate sources that you can use to better understand, explain, and support your analysis. For this assignment, you will produce an annotated bibliography—an alphabetized list of sources and notes about what the sources say and how you might use their ideas in your own work this semester. The work you complete on this Annotated Bibliography will help you to write a strong Secondary Source Integration paper, in which you will integrate or combine your primary source analysis with selections from your annotated bibliography.

Assignment Purpose

Broadly speaking, the purpose of the Annotated Bibliography assignment is for you to create a useful set of curated research notes that you can use later this semester when you draft your Secondary Source Integration paper. This assignment is also designed to help you meet five other objectives:

Use Library resources to locate additional materials to cite in your writing

Practice using MLA Style and Citation format

Practice identifying main ideas and key points of sources

Demonstrate summary writing, paraphrasing, quoting, and citation skills

Begin to connect the voices and ideas of other sources with your own ideas

Assessment Criteria

Your Annotated Bibliography is worth 50 points and should meet the following Content and Design criteria:

Content Criteria

Your Annotated Bibliography should consist of citations and annotations for four sources that are timely, useful, credible, and relevant to your chosen primary source. At least 1 of your annotated sources should be a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal article. For each of your four sources, you should include:

The full citation of the source in MLA format

Below the citation, include a 2-paragraph annotation of the source.

A descriptive summary paragraph:

Briefly describe the source (where it comes from, who wrote it, what makes it trustworthy).

Use a combination of paraphrasing and direct quotations to clearly summarize the main ideas and key points of the source. Be detailed and specific. For instance, do not simply say that an article is “about personal confidence.” What, specifically, does the article say about personal confidence? Each sentence containing quoted or paraphrased information must include an in-text citation.

An explanatory paragraph:

Explain how you’ll use the source in your research paper. Be specific. Will this support your analytical argument? Complicate it? Disagree with it? Something else? Review page 59 of our textbook, which describes 5 ways that you might use a secondary source.

What do you feel would be the rhetorical impact of using this source in the way you plan to use it? In other words, how will using this source be a benefit to your paper?