ACAD 1601 F04: Academic Writing: September - December 2016
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Annotated bibliography

This assignment is due on October 28. It must be submitted through SafeAssign as well as in paper.

You must produce an annotated bibliography containing two entries.

In preparation for your academic essay, you must research two resources that you will ideally use for your academic essay assignment. One source must be a peer-reviewed, academic source that you will probably use and respond to in your essay. This is usually an essay from an academic journal, though it could be a chapter from an academic book or a whole academic book. Your second source can be anything that is authoritative and appropriate for an academic essay. Examples of valid material to use are appropriate reference resources, documents produced by government agencies, and well-respected news media sources. Wikipedia, unauthored Web pages, and popular media items (in print and/or digital) are examples of material to avoid for this assignment.

For this assignment, you need to write two short paragraphs for each of these two sources. The first paragraph is a brief summary (or abstract) of the source: it should include an account of what the source is about and what its main argument is (if it is an academic source) and its main purpose is (if it is a non-academic source). This paragraph should be paraphrase only: use only your own words. The second paragraph is a brief account of how you might be using the source in your academic essay: you may here need to identify secondary arguments from the source. Indicate whether you will be, for example, applying what is said to your argument, or demonstrating that the argument is in opposition to or problematic with what your essay will be arguing, or using the argument of one source to show conflicts with another source. Note that for at least your academic source, it is not sufficient to say that you will be using the data / facts / information / background provided by the essay: you need to indicate how you will be interacting with the source’s argument(s).

For this assignment, you may not use the essay “Gandhian Nonviolence and the Salt March” by Thomas Weber.

Penalty: 30 points if one of the entries is not of an academic, peer-reviewed source.
Penalty: up to 20 points for missing, inaccurate, or poorly formatted bibliographic information.

You can consult the Purdue Online Writing Lab and our library’s “How do I write an annotated bibliography?” for information about preparing annotated bibliographies (or you can remember what was said in class).

As always, identify quotations accurately. There is no need to use any other source than the two you are annotating. Format your bibliography according to MLA, APA, or Chicago rules.

As always, use double-space lineation, one-inch margins, and the Times New Roman font, 12-point in size.



Marc R. Plamondon, Ph.D. Department of English Studies Nipissing University