Before you can begin writing your Annotated Bibliography for our course, you must know the topic for your final research paper. If you are struggling with a topic be sure to contact me so we can work together to have that finalized before this Annotated Bibliography is due. Guidelines for the Final Research Paper are in the Assignments tab and various modules throughout our course.
The purpose of an Annotated Bibliography is for you to investigate what sources you might want to use for your final research paper. You don’t have to use the sources in your Annotated Bibliography in your final paper, and the act of writing the Annotated Bibliography will help you decide which sources you should use. It will also help prevent you from procrastinating! It’s important that you don’t procrastinate for your final research paper.
For the Annotated Bibliography, you should identify at least 4 scholarly sources you might want to use for your final research paper. Then, you annotate and analyze those sources (evaluate the credibility of each source).
Begin by writing an MLA-Style entry as you would for a Works Cited page for the source you have found.
Under that entry, in one paragraph, write a brief summary of the source.
In that same paragraph, discuss how the source may or may not be relevant for your paper.
Then, in that same paragraph, analyze the credibility of the source. There is a guide to evaluating the credibility of sources in our Course Resources menu under Learning Resources. Be sure to study that guide as you evaluate the credibility of the sources you find.
Below is a sample annotated bibliography entry from a journal article to give you an idea of how your annotations should look and what they should include:
London, Herbert. “Five Myths of the Television Age.” Television Quarterly 10.1
(1982): 81-89.
Herbert London, the Dean of Journalism at New York University and author of several books and articles, explains how television contradicts five commonly believed ideas. He uses specific examples of events seen on television, such as the assassination of John Kennedy, to illustrate his points. His examples have been selected to contradict such truisms as: “seeing is believing”; “a picture is worth a thousand words”; and “satisfaction is its own reward.” London uses logical arguments to support his ideas, which are his personal opinion. He doesn’t refer to any previous works on the topic. London’s style and vocabulary would make the article of interest to any reader.
