An annotated bibliography is much like our citation pages for our papers, except they include summaries of what that citation is in reference to your paper. Annotated bibliographies, when published, help readers who are looking into a certain book, article, etc., know what that book is about, even what the pros and cons are too. Unpublished, they still help people, students like us so that we can know what that book or article is about so we don't have to read the book or article ourselves. Annotated bibliographies are also very important to our paper because they provide the citations for the books, articles, etc. that we have used.
I believe you are requiring us to do one in class because you are preparing us for our other classes. Much like our other assignments during this course, it's practice. Even if we are still not sure, these homework assignments are like trial and error, we learn from the mistakes and learn to perfect them. Not that an annotated bibliography is this masterful piece of work, but it is always good to have all these little things done well. In the end, it will reflect how we do our work and what is going to be seen in our papers.
You and I are almost clearly on the same page, I feel the same way as you,This type of assignment are very useful to us as student although tedious, it prepares us for a better paper.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that I'm assigning them to prepare you for other classes. Also, the specifications that I listed for what you have to include in the annotations lets me see how you are actually evaluating each source, which isn't always apparent in a research paper!
ReplyDeleteOn the first part, though, I guess you could get some idea of whether a source would be useful for you from an annotated bibliography... But the summaries are so short that I wouldn't NOT go look through a book just because someone else didn't find it useful. Your annotated bibliography will be most helpful to you - it helps you organize your research.
When I do research, I usually take a lot of notes on the more useful articles (or highlight the crap out of my photocopy or printed pdf). Writing the annotation forces me to sit down and organize those notes into a concise summary. And then, when I sit down to write the paper, when I want to say something but am like "I know I read about this detail somewhere, which article WAS that?!?!" -- I can pull out the annotated bibliography and use that to help me remember which set of notes I should start digging through!