Literature Review/Annotated Bibliography

(Total Value 10%)

 

 

 

I have seen some D2L issues with regard to some text on a given page loading properly. I suggest that you immediately use your F5 key and refresh this page now and each subsequent time you view it.

 

Due in D2L drop box ten minutes prior to the beginning of class (to the minute, or it is one calendar day late). Moreover, it must be turned in as a MS Word DOC, DOCX, or RTF file.

 

 

 

Due Date:  03/29/10

 

To make these guidelines easy to understand, I am going to use sixsections, as follows:

  1. I tell you what an annotated bibliography is.
  2. I provide an example of an entry.
  3. The criteria to determine a valid source.
  4. The grading criteria.
  5. What you should do to get started.
  6. A research strategy to help with your Research Paper, which is the major project that is due after this Literature Review/Annotated Bibliography, and is worth 20% of your final course grade.

Section 1: What is an annotated bibliography?

  • It is made up of 10 entries, and each entry has 2 parts:
  1. A MLA style citation.
  2. An annotation
  • You will research 10 scholarly sources, meaning scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, through the Temple College Library interface, all on any combination of authors, poets, short stories, or poems, and then you write an entry for each one. You may choose from any writer or work we have read, or will read, in the fiction or poetry section of this course. In effect, you could have ten articles, each with a very different focus. Pay close attention to section three of this assignment prompt: The Criteria That Determines a Valid Source.

Section 2: An example of an entry:

WHAT IS A CITATION?

  • A citation provides the publishing information on your source.  It cites where the source was published, who wrote it, and a few other things you will learn about during class by working closely with the MLA book.

WHAT IS AN ANNOTATION?

The ones you write must be 100-150 words, which will include only the words in the annotation, and not the citation.

  • An annotation is a short summary of your source, and it is also a critique of it. Simply put, your annotations do two things:
  1. Explain, or summarize, what the source is about, and the source’s thesis is summarized somewhere in your annotation.
  2. Evaluate why the source is a worthwhile one to read.

Your objective here is that anyone who reads your final work will understand the argument at stake in each of your sources.  They will also know the problems or solutions, if any, that the source proposes.  Finally, they will understand from your evaluation whether the source is of a superior nature, or if they should go look for a different scholarly source on this subject.

 

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF AN ENTRY:
 

Toal, Catherine. ‘"Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened": Fiction, Identification, and "Benito Cereno."’ Nineteenth-Century Literature  61.1 (2006): 32-65. Print.

Observing that Herman Melville's most significant fictional addition to his source text for "Benito Cereno" (the San Dominick's skeleton figurehead) reverses the terms of a trope used in the "Agatha" letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of 13 August 1852, this article proposes that the skeleton's role in the tale converts a frustrated attempt at the identificatory lures involved in the processes of fiction-making and fiction-reading. Although there has been considerable focus on the narrative's manipulation of identification, critics have not provided an account of the ways in which its total fictional structure, organized around the skeleton figurehead, systematically alters the meaning of its white protagonists'—and its readers'—potential affiliations. It traces the functions and implications of "Benito Cereno"'s skeleton through an exploration of the tale's reception history, showing this history to be comprised of a series of identificatory maneuvers. Overall, this would be a difficult article to negotiate for someone new to literary studies.

 

 

  • The above example of an entry is from the abstract on the article itself, edited by me for the word count requirements of this project.
  • Notice that the example entry begins with the citation, the first line of which is flush to the left margin. However, the second line of the citation is formatted with a hanging indent. In MS Word you can right click anywhere in the document, choose “Paragraph,” and then under “Special,” change the option there from “none” to “hanging.”
  • The second part of the example entry is the annotation, and the word count is 154, which does not include the words in the citation. The entire annotation is flush to the left margin.
  • Your annotations must be 100 to 150 words for each annotation, which does not include the words in the citation.

Section 3: The criteria to determine what constitutes a valid source:

Your 10 sources MUST consist of the following:

  • All 10 articles must be from peer-reviewed scholarly journals

Do not vary from the above criteria or one or more of your sources may be invalid; for each invalid source you will lose 10%.

You cannot use newspapers, magazines, websites, or any web-related material that can be reached with just an Internet connection. In other words, you must use the TC Library interface to use databases to which the TC Library subscribes. If you work off campus you can access the materials by logging in to the Library from the TC homepage @ www.templejc.edu. 

I suggest that you use JStor, for all their articles are available in PDF format. I want you to access your articles in PDF format—as opposed to HTML—as much as possible. During class, I will make clear the differences in these two formats. Keep in mind that the citations—both in-text and works cited—are different, depending whether you access your sources in PDF or HTML.

Your 10 articles from peer-reviewed scholarly journals must have a works cited section at the end. Still, there may be no such section at the end, but the article might be footnoted throughout, which is also acceptable if the footnotes give the publication information that is typically found in a works cited page citation.

The upshot is that the sources you choose must engage sources from other scholars, and they should be documented as such.

The articles you choose must be at least four pages in length, or they will be considered invalid. The articles must also have a named author, by which I mean the name of a person or persons, as opposed to just the name of some organization. Articles without an author or authors’ names, or from anonymous sources, or that fail to negotiate the above criteria will be considered invalid, and will earn no credit.

Section 4: Grading Criteria:

  • You must have 10 entries.
  • Each entry is worth 10 points, making the entire project worth 100 points.
  • The citation portion of each entry is worth five points, and the annotation portion of each entry is worth five points.
  • For each citation error you will lose one point.
  • Points may be deducted from the annotation for typos, poor phrasing, sentence level errors, and so on.
  • Remember to include a sentence in your annotation that evaluates the scholarly source you are writing about; if there is no evaluation you will lose two points.
  • Remember to give your project a two part title, separated by a colon.
  • Just like a works cited page, the entries are organized alphabetically, by the authors’ last names.

 

Citation Tips:

When doing your research you will enter a query and then view a results list from which you will choose an article by clicking on a link. Do not be so quick to click on the title of the article. If you have the option, click on the PDF link under the title of the article, or elsewhere on the page. PDF simply means that you will view the scanned pages from the actual journal; citing these types of articles is much easier. It is acceptable to click on “Full Text,” but these will often appear in HTML form and are more problematic to cite.

Work closely with the D2L handout “Examples of Common Works Cited Page Citations. The two examples that you will need are both titled “Example of an article in a journal.” One of those examples is for articles in PDF, and the other is for HTML. Make certain to choose the correct style.

 

 

Section 5: What you should do to get started:

 

Immediately do all the research in one session. Research and print out twelve to fifteen articles, paper-clamping each one as it comes out of the printer, so as to stay organized. Once this is accomplished, you have ended the research process. You can then spend the remainder of your time crafting this project. It may seem like this is not terribly involved, but there are many pitfalls associated with a project of this scope, and time-management is key to your success. Invariably, students who do not do well on this project have a commonality: they wait too long to get started.

 

Section 6: A research strategy to help with your Research Paper.

 

Remember that after this Literature Review is turned in, we move on to the next major project, the Research Paper, which is worth 20% of your final course grade. On the same day we go over this Literature Review assignment prompt in class, we also review the prompt for the Research Paper because I want you to collect some sources that you think you would use again in the Research Paper. The upshot is that it would behoove you to decide now what single piece of literature you will focus on in your Research Paper.

 

Due Date: 03/29/10