AP English

Research Project

Annotated Bibliography

Assigned Feb. 10 2014

Number of sources: Minimum three. More, depending on the length of the articles. You must read a minimum of thirty-five (35) pages of criticism. You may not use sources available through the mainstream Internet, although scholarly articles accessed through such online databases as EbscoHost are fine. All but one of your articles must show publication dates after 1970. You may use one (1) article published before 1970.

Some students in the past have been directed by librarians to very short articles that are more like reviews and are published in bound volumes. These are too short. Look for articles of at least eight pages. Most good ones are longer. You’re looking for articles like those by Wolff and Showalter. Many come in collections of critical essays published on single novels by Twaynes, Modern Critical Views, Twentieth Century Interpretations, and Harold Bloom.

Minimum annotation for each source: 1.5 pages

Total minimum pages: 5.5 (see below)

Specifications: typed, MLA

Point Value: 200

Due dates:

1. Articles, including bibliographic information, for my review: Monday or Tuesday, March 3 or 4, whichever is an A day. Do not wait until the weekend beforeto start looking for articles.

2. First summary/response paper for review: March 20/21(A day). I don’t plan to grade this until it is resubmitted with the final product. I just want to know you’re doing it right. If less than half of the class submits one, however, I will collect them and grade them.

3. Final draft of project: Thursday or Friday, April 10 or 11—whichever is an A day. Right now the 11th is an A day.

Early submissions—of articles for approval and summary/response papers—are welcome.

A Works Cited page is not required. Document your source according to MLA specs at the top of the page of each summary/response.

Procedure:

Choose a novel you have read for school—preferably one you enjoyed. It must be a novel that I have read too, so if you choose one from past years, check with me before you begin your research.

Go to the library (or search articles through EBSCO) and read around in the criticism that has been written about it. From among the zillion critical essays available in books and journals, choose a few to explore. Three of these will constitute the source material for your project.

Each critical essay you choose must be at least eight pages long, and must be approved by me. Recent articles tend to be better suited to our task, but some of these can be pretty convoluted. Choose articles that are written in a style accessible to you. If the first page doesn’t make sense, don’t waste your time trying to figure it out.

The term annotated bibliography sounds more intimidating than it is.

Annotating is simply commenting, in note form, on something you’ve read. When you make notes in the margin of a book, you are annotating. Thorough annotating involves interpreting, questioning, evaluating, summarizing, and explaining the source with which you are working. You are also annotating when you introduce something of your own, which may be a question, a comparison, or an opposing argument. Since this takes a good deal of time to do well, get started now.

You will read a minimum of thirty-five pages of literary criticism about the novel you have read (at least three sources) and turn in a one-and-a-half-page evaluation of each source.

An annotated bibliography is basically a bibliography with comments. A simple annotated bibliography lists the works consulted for a paper along with remarks geared toward helping the reader decide whether or not the source would be useful for his/her purposes.

Your annotated bibliography will involve more than simply taking notes, because your evaluation of each source should be presented as a formal reaction of at least one-and-one-half pages in length. No more than half should be summary. The rest should be your response. Which, if any, critical perspective is represented in the article? What do you think of the critic’s assessment of your novel? Remember that the key is to support your points with evidence from the text, which you can’t do very well if you haven’t read the novel.

Once you have written your three (minimum) summary/response papers, write a one-page comprehensive analysis of the whole research package. How do the sources stand up to one another? Where do the critics agree? Where do they disagree? What connections do you see? You may include comments about your research experience in general. Were your sources fairly straightforward or difficult to interpret? What did you learn about doing research in general? Be sure to comment on your sources specifically in terms of how they engage with the novel you chose.

I think this will be a beneficial project because it focuses entirely on the research, which sometimes gets slighted in favor of the paper. Simply pasting together a lot of information from different sources, without showing how the sources connect or drawing your own conclusions, results in a bad paper. I know because I have done it. The best papers are products of thorough research, which involves analyzing and responding to your sources and the way they interact with one another, and finally integrating them into a finished product which supports your own position on your subject. That’s why this project concentrates on the process.

The first page of your paper should look like this:

Lastname 1

First name Last name

Ms. Burke

AP English

April 29, 2009

Lovegood,Xenophilius. “Harry Potter is Cooler Than you Think.” Journal of Modern Philology. 91 (2004): 67-85.

Summary

XenophiliusLovegood argues in his essay “Harry Potter is Cooler than you Think” that people who read Harry Potter are cool, just not in ways generally recognized as cool in the main stream. Harry Potter is immortal fiction because it addresses Great Truths in an entertaining way and alludes to academic things, including the history and mythology of many countries, and incorporates words from Latin and Middle English and old Scandinavian languages into its nomenclature. It also has a ton of icons, and icons are cool. And so on for a half page or so.

Response

While parts of Lovegood’s article are compelling, his contention that people who name their cats after aurors are getting a little carried away is short-sighted and pompous. Tonks is a great name for a cat. Cats figure prominently in the series. Crookshanks is an important cat, as is Mrs. Norris (named after a meddlesome Jane Austen character), and Professor McGonagall’s animagus form is feline. And so on for about a page.

Do this three times, or four if your articles are short.

Do NOT, anywhere in the paper, reproduce the language of the article verbatim without enclosing the words in quotes and citing the page number.

Obviously you will be paraphrasing in your summary. The danger of putting this off until the last minute is that it’s easy when you’re in a rush to succumb to plagiarism. Don’t do this. Start early, take your time, and complete the assignment with integrity.

Scoring:

Depends on how many summary/response papers you have. I score each one individually. If you have three s/r papers, then each counts 50 points (25 for the summary and 25 for the response), and the synthesis counts 50 points, for a total of 200.

I don’t have a checklist for this assignment. I will be looking at

  • MLA Citation as in sample first page (exactly)
  • Content: did you read and understand the full article?
  • Support: do you use sufficient, appropriate examples from the article and the novel? Are your quotes integrated smoothly and logically?
  • Clarity
  • Coherence
  • Present tense
  • No second person
  • First person only in response, used sparingly
  • Correct use of critic’s name: First and last the first time you use it, and then last name only, spelled correctly.
  • Conventions of formal English: spelling, punctuation, s-v agreement, pronoun agreement, fragments and run-ons, contractions