In this class you will be responsible for directing your own research, research you have already had a great start on with your proposal and search assignment and bibliography. Now you will begin exploring those sources you located in greater depth, finding other, more appropriate sources as you focus your research, reading them carefully, and accurately summarizing their contents and evaluating those contents within the context of your own research project. You will be compiling an annotated bibliography, which is a formal product of that research, a product that demonstrates you are learning four skills that will be very important to your college success:

• directing your own research.
• reading and understanding academic prose, and recasting it in your own words (summarizing).
• evaluating complex arguments, differentiating among their central points, strengths and weaknesses, and developing your own conclusions about them.
• learning how to use a handbook or style guide to look up conventions of documentation within a given discipline.

Assignment:
An annotated bibliography can be summative, evaluative, critical, etc. This assignment asks you to produce both summative and evaluative components. This means each annotation will include a short, but careful summary of the original text (75-125 words) and an evaluation of that text and its usefulness to your project (75-125 words). You will be using the most promising sources you discovered in your earlier search assignment and investigating those in greater depth. Although there are many kinds of annotated bibliographies, produced for all fields of academic inquiry, this assignment asks that:

• the paper have a general descriptive title
• each annotation appears in alphabetical order, by last name of author
• the entries follow the conventions of MLA citation (both for the entry header and to cite and material in-text).
• each annotation has both a summative and evaluative component
• that you design pages that are readable and attractive (not necessarily in term-paper format!)

Purpose
Although it’s probably clear why I think this is an important assignment (future academic success, blah, blah, blah), I also think this is a useful assignment for you. Because your next assignment is a project based on this research, by the time you have finished this assignment, you will know a lot about your topic. It will be much easier for you to complete your project as your sources will already be organized, and you even have paraphrases/summaries of the material to copy and paste right in to your work—if you are working on that sort of project! In addition, you have the opportunity to get significant feedback from your peers and me so that you know you have found the best sources, that you are citing them correctly, and that you understand their arguments. The writing portion of this project will be the easiest you’ve ever undertaken!

Evaluation Criteria
You'll be graded A-F for this assignment, but you have a great deal of control over your grade:

• A=15+ developed, well-written summaries that show an understanding of the source and how it applies to your work

• B=12 developed, well-written summaries that show an understanding of the source and how it applies to your work

• C=9 developed, well-written summaries that show an understanding of the source and how it applies to your work

• D=9-15 poorly written, overly brief summaries that show little understanding of the original sources or their application to your research

• F=No assignment turned in, or fewer than 9 summaries too brief, hurriedly written, or undeveloped
  

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Grading rubric for this assignment