Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 75-100 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, called an ‘annotation’ (see examples below). The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited. In the case of dissertation research, it demonstrates that you have sourced your books, articles, and other resources, with care, and with a view to their usefulness for your research over the summer.

You should aim to have a minimum of 15 sources. Any les does not reflect adequate research. At this point in your dissertation research, you don’t have to have read all of the sources listed, but need to know their content enough to be able to write about their relevance to your research (this information can be taken from reading/the back of the book/reviews. etc.). If you have read them, all the better but if not, state their future relevance for your research. You are gathering a list of ingredients for the work to come. This is ‘working’ bibliography, and can be added to, later on.

You list cannot consist solely of internet or web-based resources (at least 60% must be books or articles, which can be sourced on the web, but are not just web sites). This does not demonstrate good scholarship, since many internet resources are unreliable. However, see below for an example of how to annotate any websites you do choose to include.

This part of the coursework counts for 10% of your overall grade (see assessment brief on Blackboard, for details). Any bibliographies submitted without annotations will fail this part of the coursework.

Suggestions for Writing AnnotationsContent: What is the resource about? Is it relevant to your research?Purpose: What is it for? Why was the book or article written? Usefulness: What does it do for your research?Reliability: Is the information accurate? Do other sources support the conclusions?Authority: Is it written by someone who has the expertise to author the information?

What are the author’s credentials?Currency: Is it new? Is it up-to-date for the topic?Ease of use: Can a “real person” use this resource? What is the reading level of the resource?

Examples of how to annotate a bibliography.

Website example (with no known authors)“How We Survived Camp Living” Revolutionary War Camping. 12 Oct. 2008. 25 Oct. 2008 http://www.revolutionarywarcamping.html

This site provided basic information about camp life. It does raise some important issues about gender and status that may be useful for the classroom. It is a commercial site rather than an academic site, so it provides some insight into the clothing that was used and may be useful for supplies. The impression I had from the title of the site was that it would have primary documents. It does list some primary sources. In

general, I would not use this site in my research paper unless I could corroborate the information with another more trustworthy source.I accessed this resource through Google.com. The search terms I used were revolutionary camping and camp life in eighteenth century.

Article example (with known authors)Adams, Samuel, John Adams and Paul Revere and edited by G. I. History “The Importance of Beer and Taverns in the American Revolution.” American Journal of Social History. 97.3 (2008), 354-382. Social History Full Text. W. H. Wilson. Castleton State College, Calvin Coolidge Library. 25 Oct. 2008. http://www.castleton.edu/tah

This article discusses the importance of beer and taverns in bringing together discussion of the American Rebellion. It draws on the first hand experience of three Revolutionaries and their experiences in the pub. The article includes discussion of social class in where one would congregate. Written for a scholarly audience, the article brings out that even though the Revolutionaries were fighting for Liberty, it was a relative term and a dangerous one. The authors all had first hand experience in the Revolution and write from different perspectives. The editor has provided a literature review as well as an extensive bibliography. The summary and general discussion provided a useful overview of the conclusions drawn by the authors and could be used in the research paper to support a conclusion. I found this article through the Social Science Fulltext database. I searched using the keywords taverns, beer and post roads.

Book example (with known authors)Washington, George and Nathaniel Greene. Military Strategies: On a Limited Budget Boston: Colonial Press, 1799

Geared for both a broad audience and professional military historians this book provides an insight into the financial crises involved in the war. The authors show the importance and reliance on foreign currency and support in the prosecuting of the war. The authors share their first hand experience of deprivation and include a list of books that they used in planning military strategy. By common consensus the authors were the best American generals and so their book is a valuable resource in understanding the relationship between economics and strategy. Chapter Two of the book is particularly useful since it contains Washington’s and Greene’s plans for the Battle of Manhattan. I found this book in the Castleton State College Library online catalog.I searched for the term finances in the Title field and sorted the results by most recently published. I found a couple of books that looked good in the catalog but this one was the most useful once I got to the shelf.

Essay Plan (40% of overall grade)

An essay plan is best understood as a ‘roadmap’. It acts as a device to A) demonstrate to people assessing your work, that you have thought about how your dissertation might be organized. B) as an essential guide (for you) to the research you will do over the summer. It provides structure, and a chapter-by-chapter schematic of how your dissertation will be organized. This can change as the research progresses, but should be detailed enough at this stage, to serve as a useful document. Mind-mapping the content is a good way to start developing an essay plan. This can then be transcribed into a list or diagram (see examples below).

Essay Plans• Writing an essay plan can help you to formulate ideas and to ensure that the structure of your final essay is logical and appropriate to the essay title.

• Essay plans can also be useful, even if they are kept very brief, to remind you of important points that should be covered in your essay, as well as highlighting the final structure of your essay.

• Try not to put too much detail into the plans: use keywords and phrases, make notes of important references and species names that should be included in the final essay. The plan is to serve as your reminder of what will go into the final essay and in what order.

There are a few simple ‘rules’ which can help make your essay plan easier to construct:

1. Your essay plan should have a logical order, i.e. a beginning, middle and an end. It should reflect what you would end up writing in the final essay. In other words, by looking at your plan, a lecturer should be able to clearly see the approach you are taking to address the essay title.

2. One way to start an essay plan is to think about possible definitions that may need to be given. For example, in an essay entitled “What is the continued relevance of photomontage?”, it would be logical to start your essay plan (and your final essay) with a definition of what “photomontage” is. This can then help you to construct the rest of your essay plan.

3. If you need some kind of historical overview, set a chapter aside for this (usually an early one), and state what you plan to cover. Don’t use history as a way to avoid analyzing the material. We are not writing historical

essays as such.

3. Depending upon the subject matter, it can be useful to establish in the plan, how many different approaches you can take to tackle the essay question. An essay plan (and subsequent essay) that shows a broad understanding of the subject matter and how it may be investigated from a number of different ‘angles’ where relevant, shows that you’ve engaged with your topic fully, and not just on a surface level.

Remember: this is a ‘working’ document, and can change later on, but must be in sufficient detail at this point, to be useful as a starting point. An essay plan needs detail, and cannot be simply ‘Chapter 1’, ‘Chapter 2’, etc, with no (or hardly any) information included.

The essay plan now carries a 40% weighting within the module, and so needs to be developed, and more detail included. Aim for 3-4 pages in length.