*I forgot to press publish on this post, so it may seem a bit dated, but it’s still interesting I promise*
One of our assignments in English is to do an annotated bibliography. I honestly had no idea what an annotated bibliography was, so I did not really know what to expect. All I knew was that it was going to be more work.
Our assignment was to do 10-15 annotated bibliographies to which I responded, “What?!?!”
That seemed like an enormous amount writing to do especially considering there was a specific set of topics that I needed to cover. Included need to be…
- Summary
- including the author’s thesis, his main points, and his conclusion
- Author’s purpose and intended audience
- Synthesis
- how this source aligns with, adds to, complicates, overlaps with, or contradicts one or more other sources on your list
- Rhetorical differences
- the rhetorical differences you see between this article and others you’ve read
- What it does for you
- a sentence (or more) detailing what this source might offer to your own argument
To be honest, I first I thought that this was dumb. I truly thought that this was going to be a waste of my time, and an assignment that took more time to do than it was worth. However, these annotated bibliographies really challenged me to read all of the articles that I found thoroughly. I needed to critically read them in order to include everything that I needed to. I found that this was a huge help when I was writing my research paper, because I had the main idea of each article all written out for me already. So, although the annotated bibliographies were a huge pain to write at first, they ended up being extremely beneficial. (I am finding that is how most assignments in my CTW class tend to be).
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Image 1: http://i.giphy.com/Wq7xqylQsSVhK.gif