Writing Exercise: The Annotated Bibliography

I will not mince words. Annotated Bibliographies are weird. They almost always precede larger research projects, are rarely published, and have a set of rules far apart from most every other form of writing.

Rather than the steady flow from paragraph to paragraph, each one building on ideas and concepts, Annotated Bibliographies list citations of research sources, accompanied by annotations of the important aspects of the research. Hence the name Annotated Bibliography.

They’re like archipelagos: scattered, separated, independent, but interrelated.

People who encounter them for the first time sometimes have a hard time figuring out just what exactly it is they’re dealing with and why they’re dealing with it. A lot of the major rules about writing - transitions, organization, and in some instances the valued thesis, introduction, and conclusion are tossed to the wind. But annotated bibliographies can be invaluable in a research project.

Part of the problem is that the requirements vary from situation to situation. I’ve assigned annotated bibliographies for five different courses at three different schools, and was assigned them as an undergraduate and graduate student. Each time the parameters have been different, but there are a few constants.

The main constant is the form. At its core, an annotated bibliography is a list of citations with annotations, i.e., a few paragraphs describing the citation. What these annotations contain varies.

The first, and most common, annotation is the summary, an explanation of the source itself. This represents the content of the source without any interpretation, criticism, or other analysis. If you can’t reiterate the main points of a source, then you can’t summarize it. If you can’t understand it well enough to put it into your words, you should sit down with your research and get to know it better so you can.

The second annotation focuses on the rhetoric, and is sometimes called the evaluation. Rather than determine whether or not a source is useful, this determines whether or not it’s credible and reliable, generally through a rhetorical analysis. This considers the quality of the source’s arguments, if the piece is properly written, whether or not the author is credible.

The third annotation is an evaluation of the sources’ usefulness and can sometimes be called an assessment or reflection. Here, the writer gauges how helpful and relevant the research is. This is an opportunity for the writer to move from the research alone and consider their project in the long run. Sometimes determining a source’s usefulness calls for references to other pieces of research, but the main thing here is you can identify what you expect to do with the source.

There are certainly more out there, but these seem to show up the most.

Different circumstances will call for different approaches. Sometimes you may only need a summary. If it’s for a class, some teachers may be more interested in their students deciphering rhetoric than applying the source to a larger project. The purpose though is largely the same regardless of the situation. Annotated bibliographies exist so we can put aside a lot of the issues that come with writing a research essay and just focus on the research.