Essay 2 (Annotated Bibliography) Assignment Sheet

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Essay 2 (Annotated Bibliography) Assignment Sheet

Description:

This assignment asks you to begin the research process, with you ultimately writing a researched literary analysis on one of the texts we’ve examined in the class in units 1 or 2. Here’s the thing, though: you’re not actually going to write that paper just yet (that will be Essay 3). Instead, you’ll compose a writing that would ultimately help you write that essay: an annotated bibliography.

The annotated bibliography serves as a crucial step of any research process because it gathers all the research needed to successfully write a research paper — and it also proposes the research topic. This genre of writing is essentially the Works Cited page, but beefed up into a paper of sorts as it also includes brief remarks (a.k.a. annotations – summary and reflection / relevance passages, written by you) on each source you intend to use in your Essay 3 literary analysis. Please note: you are required to compose an annotated bibliography, not a traditional researched argumentative essay. Therefore, students who compose the wrong genre will suffer two full letter grades deduction (20 points). Be careful!

Your purpose in Essay 2 is to persuade your audience (me, your instructor) to approve of your research project that showcases five sources: one primary source, one theoretical source, and three scholarly sources on your topic. Your research topic for such a paper will be to analyze and comment on one theme or idea explored in your selected primary text. As a side note, some themes you might identify in the literature encountered so far in class might be related to any of the following ideas: vulnerability, education, oppression, freedom, race, gender, etc.

For your one primary source, you may select one of the following texts we examined in units 1 and 2:

  • Moffat’s “The Beast Below”, an episode of Doctor Who (video, link in Week 3 module)
  • Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (PDF in Week 4 module)
  • Langston Hughes’ “Mississippi — 1955” (PDF in Week 8 module)
  • Marilyn Nelson’s “Erase the memory of Emmett’s Victimhood” (PDF in Week 8 module)
  • Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” (PDF in Week 9 module)
  • Dominique Christina’s “For Emmett Till” (PDF in Week 9 module)

For your one theoretical source, you may select one of the following texts we examined in units 1 and 2:

  • Joy Castro’s “Hungry” or “On Becoming Educated” (WoR pp. 207-215, or links in Week 1 module)
  • Ruth Behar’s “The Vulnerable Observer” (WoR pp. 109-129)
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” (WoR pp. 242-252)

Organization

The general organization of an annotated bibliography is as follows: the first page is the introduction page, which has a title, introduction, and thesis statement. Then, the following pages of the annotated bibliography are the bibliographic entries (I call them “source pages”) for each of the five required sources for this paper — and, ultimately, Essay 3.

What are scholarly sources? These are peer reviewed journal articles written in the field of your search topic. The best place to find these types of sources is on the library databases, including Credo Reference. Please note: students are required to use scholarly sources found on a library database. If a student uses non-scholarly articles, then the paper will suffer two full letter grades deduction (20 points), even if that material is ethically integrated and perfectly cited.

At the top of each source page will be:

  • The source’s full citation (also known as the Works Cited citation; see below for templates to follow)
  • An annotation that briefly summarizes the source
  • An annotation that briefly reflects on the source’s importance and how you’d use it in your proposed essay.

Please note: plagiarism won’t be tolerated, so make every effort to integrate and cite quotations perfectly, adhering to MLA citation standards. Should a student commit plagiarism on this assignment (even if accidentally), the assignment will automatically receive a failing grade, and the student will be reported to the college. Please take care when integrating source material!

The Process:

You will, first, engage in the research process: identify a topic that interests you and, then, narrow it to an appropriate research topic. Next, compose a central research question, and then conduct a search for scholarly secondary sources that aim to answer that research question. And, finally, evaluate these sources to whittle down to three scholarly sources to be annotated and explored in your Essay 2.

Then, you will begin the process of putting together your bibliography: first, compose the full citations for each source. Next, actively read each source to compose a summary annotation for each. Then, consider the relationships between all five sources to write an annotation for each source that explains how you would use that source in an argument. Finally, compose a title, an introductory paragraph, and a thesis statement that answers your research question and is supported by your research.

Presentation and Mechanics

Your essay should adhere to the following guidelines:

  • MLA format
  • Free of spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure mistakes
  • No more than 6 pages long, assuming the introduction and each source page is a full page long (and that’s not always the case)

Speaking of the Works Cited page…

To compose a full citation for Le Guin’s short story or for the Hughes, Brooks, and Nelson poems, here’s the template you should follow:

Last Name, First Name of author. “Title of Work.” Title of the book it was originally published in, year of publication. Handout, provided by [Instructor’s name], Desire2Learn, [Course and Section number], Central Carolina Technical College, [Day Month Year when you accessed this document].

To compose a full citation for Christina’s poem, here’s the template you should follow:

LastName, FirstName of poet. “Title of Poem.” Title of website. Desire2Learn,  [Course and Section number], Central Carolina Technical College, [Day Month Year when you accessed this document].

To compose a full citation for Moffat’s episode, here’s the template you should follow:

LastName, FirstName of author. “Title of Work.” Title of Television Show, date / year of broadcast. Title of website. Desire2Learn, [Course and Section number], Central Carolina Technical College, [Day Month Year when you accessed this doc].

To compose a full citation for the textbook (Castro or Behar), here’s the template you should follow:

LastName, FirstName of author. “Title of Essay.” Title of Textbook, edited by Editor’s Name(s), Publisher, Year, Page range of entry.

To compose a full citation journal articles found on a database, here’s the template you should follow:

LastName, FirstName (plus et al if more than two authors). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal, vol. [volume number], no. [issue number], year of publication, pp. [page numbers]. NameOfDatabase, doi# (or URL if no doi). Accessed [Day Month Year when you accessed this document].

Certainly, you could also simply use the citation generator in the database to compose it for you, but I would advise you to be sure and compare it with what the Purdue OWL and your textbook instructs so that you don’t unknowingly submit your citations with mistakes. Don’t forget to add the access date at the end of each citation (the library databases sometimes won’t do that for you).

Be sure to use hanging indent when formatting full citations.

How about in-text citations?

For the textbook and the Le Guin short story, provide the last name of the author plus the page number, like so: (Castro 208) or (Le Guin 2). Same thing is true for journal articles: since articles have actual page numbers, you’ll simply include the author(s) last name(s) and the page number, like so: (LastName #).

For the Moffat television episode, include the range of hours, minutes, and seconds like so: (Moffat 00:21:36-00:24:32).

For the poems written by Hughes, Dylan, Brooks, and Nelson, you need to put the last name of the poet and the line number(s), like so: (Hughes lines 2-4).

For Christina’s poem — which is in prose — you’ll need to cite the paragraph because you’ve accessed the poem online and there are no page numbers. So, first, number the paragraphs. Then, when crafting the in-text citation, include the last name of the poet and abbreviate “paragraph” as “par.”, followed by the paragraph number, like so: (Christina par. 4).