Annotated Bibliography Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is to help you locate informative, authoritative, and academic
materials for your paper. As you explore these resources and complete a short in class exercise,
locate specific articles and books that you will use in addition to your textbook to write your paper.
You will be turning in a statement of your topic, a thesis statement and an ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY of a minimum of six sources, at least two of which must be from an academic
source such as a scholarly magazine or book which uses an academic vocabulary. The
bibliography is due on _________________.
What is an annotated bibliography?
“An annotated bibliography is, simply, an organized list of sources, each of which is
followed by a brief note or “annotation.” These annotations do one or more of the
following: describe the content and focus of the book or article; suggest the source’s
usefulness to your research; evaluate its method, conclusions, or reliability; record
your reactions to the source.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center
http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/AnnotatedBibliography.html
Each entry in an annotated bibliography consists of a bibliographic citation and an annotation:
Bibliographic Citation
The first part of each entry is the bibliographic information: author, title, place of publication,
publisher, copyright date, and so on. A common form for bibliographic citations is the MLA
format, the one used for your papers in English 101. If you wish, visit Citing Sources
(http://library.spokanefalls.edu/CitingSources.stm) for more information on MLA style.
Annotation
Annotations are short (two or three sentence) summaries of what the book, article, or web page is
about, as well as a description of why it would be useful to your paper. Here is an entry taken
from an actual student annotated bibliography:
Menkin, Daniel Lee. Faith, Hope and the Corporation. St. Paul: Phrontisterian,
1988.
This book focuses on a company’s philosophy and outlook, as well as ethics. The
author feels understanding all of these areas makes for a more ethical business.
I would use this source in my paper as it has a different and interesting slant to it.
For more examples and a discussion of annotated bibliographies, see
http://library.spokanefalls.edu/CitingSources.stm
See also:
http://library.spokanefalls.edu/docs/annotated_bib_assignment2.doc
http://library.spokanefalls.edu/docs/sample_bib1.doc
http://library.spokanefalls.edu/docs/sample_bib2.doc
DL Hamm M&F Annotated Bib Fall 2002