Police brutality or technology

ENG 105 Assignment #3: Annotated Bibliography

Important Dates and Requirements
Length: 1,200 words
First Draft: Post 4 sources to Eli Review (100-150 word abstracts): Wednesday, October 21
Second Draft: Post 4 more sources to Eli Review: Wednesday, October 28
Final Draft: Submit Annotated Bibliography (8 sources) to UB Learns: Friday November, 6
10% of your final grade

Starting research can be a daunting task. As you work to find and evaluate sources, you must also figure out how they fit within a larger conversation–or if they are part of that conversation at all! The Annotated Bibliography utilizes the same skills you learned in your Summary paper. In addition to finding, reading, and understanding sources within your topic area, your goal is to provide a short annotation of about 150 words or so, which summarizes the source’s main point, other interesting or useful details, and evaluates its credibility. The final Annotated Bibliography, then, is like a roadmap for your future projects. Putting it together will help you understand the conversation that is already happening on this issue.

For each source, you will need to identify the author(s) and publication, as well as provide relevant contextual information. You should also identify the kind of contribution the source makes, summarize the position or argument, and assess its credibility. Imagine your reader is someone who possesses limited knowledge about this issue, but wants to get up to speed quickly. This reader would want to know the major positions, people, and events associated with this issue, for example, as well as be able to distinguish between ideas that represent broadly held consensus and those that are considered marginal. In the next assignment (the Multimodal Literature Review) you will need to help your reader understand how these sources relate to each other, respond to each other, and offer similar (or different) points of view or arguments.

The bulk of your time on this assignment should be spent finding sources, reading, and taking notes. Start by sketching out the answers to some basic questions about situation and context: What is interesting to authors about this particular issue? What ideas or positions are they responding to? What events or circumstances are they responding to? What interests and engages you about this issue? How are researchers investigating this issue? Then, consider how these sources relate to each other: What are the major controversies or disagreements? Are these disagreements new or old? What is at stake and for whom in them? How has the conversation about this issue changed over time? Who are the major voices on this issue?

Steps to completing this assignment:
Use the search strategies you learned from the Library sessions. The UB Library home page, and its related search functions, should be one of the main tools that you use to discover sources.
Vet your sources! Look up their previous publications, their social media profiles, their appearances in video, and any other pertinent information. In addition to assessing their credibility, vetting your sources will help you distinguish between major viewpoints and marginal ones.
Review your citations to ensure they are in MLA style. Remember: you can use the UB Library search functions to automatically generate an MLA bibliographic entry for you!

Tips for success:
Every source you find will reference other sources—use these references and bibliographies to help develop your own sense of the broader conversation.
Take notes! Use print-outs or a digital notation system to record your own reactions, questions, and potential connections to other sources as annotations that you can use to build your bibliography.
Ask me if you have any questions.

Format Requirements
At least 8 sources, with abstracts of 100-150 words
12-point font, double-spaced, standard font
Bibliographic entries clearly formatted
On the top left hand corner of the first page only: your name, instructor’s name, class, date
Uploaded document needs to be a doc, docx or a pdf (it cannot be a google link or pages)

As with all formal assignments, this one will be graded according to the following rubric:

Organization: The paper has an overall point to make, and the individual sections of the paper contribute to making that point. Sentences stay on topic. Paragraphs stay on topic. The sentences within each paragraph build toward a common purpose. It would be easy to make an outline from the paper because points are developed in large coherent sections, rather than scattered throughout the paper. The paper is focused.

Elegance: The paper shows creativity of expression. Sentence structure varies within paragraphs and within the paper, and is used to achieve various effects. Elevated, overly “academic” prose is not used unless it is required. The style of the prose contributes to the persuasive appeals of the essay. The writing seems natural, and thoughts appear to flow into each other. There are few to zero grammatical, sentence, or spelling errors that get in the way of the author’s purpose or the reader’s understanding.

Engagement: The paper follows the directions on the assignment sheet. The paper shows that the author has synthesized the lessons from the textbook and class discussion, and incorporated those lessons into the paper. The paper shows fluency and creativity as a result of reading and analyzing several examples of the genre. The paper shows consideration of feedback received during the draft workshop (you will be able to let me know if you decided not to take some feedback, and why). When sources are required, the paper uses them effectively, ethically and correctly. The paper shows development from the draft to the final stage.

Rhetorical accommodation: The paper uses strategies for achieving its purpose with its defined audience within a particular context. The paper shows that the writer has worked to be credible, ethical and purposeful. The paper is constructed for the context and audience, rather than simply for its author’s expression. The paper shows consideration of its imagined readers by addressing their knowledge, values, and interests in the topic, and by anticipating their questions. The paper incorporates consideration of other viewpoints.