Due date: Friday, November 15

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 sources you’ve chosen. Each entry will include
    • the bibliographic entry (in MLA format or otherwise based on what your field uses)
    •  a summary of the source
    • a reflection on how the source is useful
    • a rhetorical analysis of the writing (speaker, audience, tone, genre, etc)
    • important quotations from the source
    • 2-4 keywords that will help others know what the source is about
  • a conclusion.

Detailed Project 2 Outline

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

  • Introduce your research topic and question.
  • Explain how or why you got interested in your question.
  • Explain what you already know as a foundation for your research.
  • Explain what you expect to find in your research (a hypothesis).
  • Write this in paragraph format (1-3 paragraphs, approximately 300 words)

Four sources

  • Aim to have 3-4 different genres for your four sources.
  • That means you might have two newspaper articles, a blog post, and a TED Talk. Examples of genres and media you might include are: newspaper articles, TED Talks, podcasts, personal essays, documentaries, magazine articles, scholarly articles, museum websites, interviews, videos, songs, Instagram threads, blog posts, multimedia texts, etc.

For each Source:

A bibliographic entry (also called a citation):

  • gives the publication information, author, date, title, publication venue, etc.
  • You should find out which citation style your department or field uses, and use that style, e.g. APA, MLA, IEEE, etc, 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 or, if no author is listed for the source, the first piece of information in the citation. 
  • 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. 

An annotation

Following each bibliographic entry, write an 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 the main point is, but also 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.
  • a brief rhetorical analysis (approximately one paragraph). For example:
    • what is the tone or style?
    • What is the author’s intended audience and purpose (reason for writing)?
    • What do you think this source is useful for?
    • 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?
    • what techniques does the author use to communicate with the intended audience
  • your reflection on that source (approximately one 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:
    • What does this document tell you about your research question? what parts help you answer your research question?
    • Are there parts of the text that you agree or disagree with? 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?
  • 1-3 important quotations that you might want to use later– these won’t contribute to the word count for each entry, but you might use them in your paragraphs or in Project 3.
  • 2-4 keywords or tags that help someone else understand what the source is about. Some sources (scholarly articles, for example, and some social media threads), will already include keywords that you might want to use.

A conclusion

At the end of your Reflective Annotated Bibliography, write 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
  • explain who you think needs to know about it and why. Be specific–“everyone” is too big of an audience.  Narrow it down to one or two groups that would benefit from gaining an understanding of what you have newly learned. 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 specific topic, we agreed to find connections across related topics to have working groups. Feel free to share resources that will help your classmates with their work both within your working group and with anyone in the class.

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 the 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 post on our OpenLab site.

The City Tech’s Library and the Writing Center can also help you with this project! Make an appointment with a reference librarian, or with a Writing Center tutor. I can also help, so please come to student support hours M 1:40-2:40, W 11:00-12:00, 1:40-2:00, or make an appointment with me.

Photo credit: “Dig deep” by charlene mcbride via Flickr under the license CC BY 2.0.