In the Project 2 assignment instructions, I included a brief outline:

Brief Project 2 Outline

Your Project 2 reflective annotated bibliography will include:

  • An introduction
  • An entry for each of the FOUR THREE SOURCES. Each entry will include
    • the bibliographic entry
    •  a summary
    • a reflection
    • an analysis of the writing
    • important quotations
  • a conclusion.

Here is a much more detailed version of that outline, that will hopefully guide you through the work of writing this project. It’s a lot to absorb, so take your time working through it, and read it more than once:

  • An introduction in which you
    • Introduce your research topic and question.
    • Explain how or why you got interested in your question.
    • Explain what you expect to find in your research (a hypothesis).
    • Write this in paragraph format (1-3 paragraphs, approximately 300 words)
  • THREE sources. Each of these three sources will need to be a different genre. That is, you can’t have three magazine articles or three YouTube videos. Examples of genres and media you might include are: newspaper articles, TED Talks, podcasts, personal essays, documentaries, magazine articles, scholarly articles, museum websites, interviews, video, songs, Twitter threads, etc.
  • For each source, a bibliographic entry (also called a citation):
    • gives the publication information, author, date, title, etc.
    • You should find out which citation style your department or field uses, and use that style, e.g. APA style, MLA style, to format these citations (since that’s what your field uses), and they should be listed in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. 
    • You (and I) can find more on how to do your field’s citation style at this Purdue OWL link and throughout the Purdue OWL site. You can also learn more about citations from City Tech’s library site, including how to format, for example, APA citations. A site like Easy Bib can help you format your citations, but check its work because it’s not as smart as you.
    • Here’s an example of a citation:

Fitzgerald, J. (1987). Research on Revision in Writing. Review of Educational Research, 57(4), 481-506. 

  • Following each bibliographic entry, a corresponding annotation (approximately 300-400 words, approximately 3 paragraphs) which includes 
    • a summary of the source’s content (approximately one paragraph). This will be useful for remembering what you read, and to let others know what it’s about if they want to learn more from that source. The summary should convey what the author states in the article and not your opinions (those come later). Write what you think the main point is, but also what you think the most important points are (these aren’t always the same.) This is also a good place to note what data, facts, and evidence the author uses to support their claims, and how they use this evidence to arrive at their conclusions.
    • your reflection on that source (approximately 1 paragraph), which includes your opinion of what you’ve read. This part is perhaps the most important part, so take your time here! This is where you respond to the text you’ve read. Here are some questions you might consider answering in your reflection:
      • Do you agree or disagree with the text? Why or why not? Be specific! You can quote the text here.
      • What questions do you have about what the text is saying? What don’t you understand?
      • What other information do you need to look up to better understand this source?
      • If you could say something to this author, what would you say?
      • What does this document tell you about your research question?
    • a brief analysis of the author’s writing style (approximately one paragraph). For example:
      • what is the tone?
      • What is the author’s intended audience and purpose (reason for writing)?
      • what genre is the source? Does the choice of genre make sense for the intended audience and for what the author wants to accomplish?
      • what are the author’s credentials? Why do you think the author and this content is credible?
      • How do you feel about the author’s writing style?
    • 1-2 important quotations that you might want to use later– these won’t contribute to the word count for each entry.
    • 3-5 keywords or tags that help someone else understand what the source is about. Some sources (scholarly articles, for example), will already include keywords.
  • A conclusion (approximately 300-400 words), in which you
    • summarize what you learned about your topic
    • explain how your thinking on your question deepened or changed
    • explain (with specifics!) why you think what you learned is important and who needs to hear about it
    • identify what genre you will use to convey your newly learned information to that audience. This will help you get started for Project 3!

How and where we’ll work:

Although everyone in our class will be working on a different topic, you might find connections across topics. Feel free to share resources that will help your classmates with their work.

This project will end up being approximately 1500- 2000 words. You’ll be surprised how you can write that much without padding or stretching or struggling! If you’re not getting anywhere close, check back at the suggested word count for each part, and see what else you can add in based on my guidelines for the different sections.

Each step of the project will be part of our daily work of the course for the next several weeks. We’ll pre-write, brainstorm, develop research questions, and share our sources and annotations on our OpenLab site, both in discussions and in posts using the category Project 2 Work. Then we’ll finalize the reflective annotated bibliography in a post, and write a reflection (instructions to follow) about the project in a private post on our OpenLab site.

The City Tech Writing Center can also help you with summary, rhetorical analysis, citations, developing a research question, among other aspects of writing. So can our writing lab/student support hour, each Thursday from 12:00-1:00pm, or the student support times right before and right after our class meetings on Tuesdays.