I don't think too many students are ever excited to start an annotated
bibliography, but it is actually one of these really useful tasks that you learn
a lot from and that can be very handy in your own research. Now you know probably
what a bibliography is. It's a list of references -- a list of articles and books
and so on. And "annotate" just means that we provide a note or two about what
is in in each item, what the contents of each particular text are. So that's what
an annotated bibliography is, and it can be simply one item, as we have here. So we
have a citation, then we have a summary. It can be just one item like this, or it
can be actually this pattern repeated many times. And an annotated bibliography
can be as big or as small as you want it to be, but very often these
bibliographies are written about a particular topic, or subject, or author, or
period, and they help you to understand the kind of research in a
particular field. So if you're doing let's say an undergraduate dissertation
or you're starting on your PhD, doing an annotated bibliography just gives you a
really good sense of what is out there in terms of criticism and research. You
can also do this for other scholars, so there are lots of online annotated
bibliographies for instance, and it just really helps out other scholars to find
material that's interesting and worthwhile. They don't just have to go by
the title, but they can actually look at the summary and figure out: is this
useful or not? So that's generally what an annotated bibliography looks like
then. In the small version you just have one citation and a summary, and you can
repeat this as many times as you like. You can organize these citations and
summaries alphabetically if you like, you can have different sections by topic
let's say, so you can talk about theoretical works versus practical works,
or you can organize it by primary works versus secondary works -- whatever
suits your fancy ... as long as your annotated bibliography is neatly
organized. The other thing you can do is you can
also add some explanatory notes, maybe at the beginning or as you go along, just to
kind of say what the point of the bibliography is. So maybe a little intro, or
for each section you can add a little line or two just describing what
that section is about. But often your instructor will tell you what to do
for that. Now when it comes to the summary itself I guess I should first
point out that the citation you can format it in whatever style
that you're using. That can be APA, MLA -- whatever is appropriate for your
discipline. But as we get to the actual summary here, there are a number of
things to consider, and first of all you have to consider the kind of tone that
you adopt. There are kind of two camps as to what the best tone for this kind
of summary is. Some people insist that you should always be neutral.
They want you to be neutral and dispassionate. You shouldn't really say
what your opinion is. The other camp (and this is kind of the opposite point of
view) suggests that you should always be evaluating the quality of what you're
describing. You should say if it's good or not, if the reader should
actually be going to photocopy the article or print it out, and if it's
not then leave it alone. So should we have neutral summaries or
evaluative summaries? My preference is for neutral but there are other people
out there who definitely say you might as well evaluate a bit. I think as
long as you're consistent and you know what you want to do, then either one is
fine. If you're going to go for the evaluating kind, there's no exact way
to do that. Some people will say first you should summarize and then
evaluate, but it doesn't have to be that way.
You can say right at the beginning that this particular piece of
research sucks -- if that's the way you're gonna go. But this particular example
does not evaluate. It simply summarizes. The other thing to consider
is the kind of contrast between content (the content of the
article) and the argument of ... well, I said article but it could be any kind of text.
It could be a book or something like that. So we need to distinguish between
the content and the argument. The content is simply a bunch of topics that are
discussed in this particular text. The argument is how those topics fit
together. And I always like to start this kind of summary with something like the
author's name (and you just have to give the last name; you don't have to keep
repeating the first name) and then some kind of verb that suggests that the
author is arguing something, or suggesting, or he or she
believes something, or claims. Some kind of strong verb like that that forces me
to actually state what the argument is, and when I read the text I often go
looking for the thesis (maybe even quote it directly) in order to really indicate
what the author is trying to argue. How do the different pieces, the different
parts of the text, hang together and work together? So don't just say
"Cassal ... describes" or "talks" about the slander
of these these two characters, and he talks about these themes and those
themes. That's not really good enough. You really need to say what he is
specifically arguing. As you can see going through this, this is a very
specific summary. This is a very short article (it's only three pages) so
it's easy to do this, but it's always good to be as specific as you can. In
terms of the length of a summary, it's really up to you, so if this is your own
annotated bibliography it's up to you what you want to do with it. But
obviously the longer it is, the harder it is going to be for the reader to scan
and kind of get a sense of what the different texts are about. So in that
sense I would suggest that you keep it to one paragraph as much as possible.
A paragraph can be one sentence if it's a fairly straightforward
article, and it's not that relevant, or it can be quite a bit longer if it's a book
let's say and it's really crucial to the research that you're doing or the
particular topic. Then maybe you want a little bit more. But you definitely have
quite a bit of leeway in terms of how long you want to go. The other thing that
I suggest to people is that it's nice to have a quote or two in your annotated
bibliography. You don't have to stick it full of quotations, but in this
case here I have I've picked a quote because I felt it really captured
one of the things that the author is saying. The other reason for this is
that often you're creating an annotated bibliography for yourself, so if you're
gonna write an essay later, let's say, it's nice to have some of these quotes
already inside your summary because then you can use them again and you can
really get a sense of what the author's own words are. But don't do this too much.
And the other thing is don't rely on the author's abstract for your summary.
That's a bit like cheating, but it's also not helpful
because sometimes an author's abstract is not actually all that clear and you
may very well be able to do a better job, or the abstract that goes with the
article isn't really relevant to your research or not as relevant as specific
parts of the article or book that you really want to focus on. Okay, so that's
generally what the annotated bibliography is about, and just to come
back to this issue of why you should bother, I think it's it's great for
really forcing yourself to understand the text, so that you dig into it and try
to figure out what is it really saying. It helps you prep for your own writing --
so kind of jump-starts your own writing. It allows you to keep meticulous
notes in case you forget later what something was about. And it's very good
for helping other scholars in your field to get a sense of what this field is
about and to kind of speed up the introduction to particular topics and
so on. Hopefully that helps you get a sense of what an annotated
bibliography is about and maybe it won't be quite
as boring in the future.