Genre Memo 2: Annotated Bibliography

For this assignment, we were asked to create a genre memo on annotated bibliographies.  An annotated bibliography is not only a place to cite your sources, but it also provides annotations, or short summaries, about each source.  The genre memo explains what annotated bibliographies look like, their general content, and what there purposes are in a research paper.  In order to carry out the making of my genre analysis, I collected three samples of annotated bibliographies.  The following are links to my samples:
1.  http://library.csun.edu/docs/mlannotbib.pdf
2.  http://write.siu.edu/Handouts/Writing%20an%20Annotated%20Bibliography.pdf
3. (from CompPile database) http://comppile.org/wpa/bibliographies/Bib7/Rose.pdf

To: Professor Vives

From: Gina Richardella

Subject: Genre Memo: Annotated Bibliography

Date: 08 October 2012

Purpose

An annotated bibliography is highly important to a scholarly research paper and serves two main functions.  The first is to provide a reference page of all of one’s sources to avoid plagiarism and to properly award credit to those author’s works and ideas one has borrowed.  The second purpose is to provide a summary of the content that is revealed in each source.  This includes a description of the article’s main points, evaluation of the author’s credentials, and how the source relates to one’s research topic. Moreover, the annotated bibliography helps the writer organize his or her thoughts on each article’s purpose in their research.  Overall, the annotated bibliography informs the readers what the source has to say.

Layout/Organization

Annotated bibliographies generally contain the following:

•  Full citation of the source
• Indentations of the annotations after each source
• Some opinion on validity to one’s research topic
•  Reveals author’s credibility
•  An overview of the source’s main points
•  Citation first, then annotation
•  Blank spaces between annotations for visual appeal

Annotated bibliographies usually omit:

•            Extensive extra detail from the source
•            Graphics
•             General assumptions
•            Multiple paragraphs
•           Color

Application to the Course

The annotated bibliography is important to ENC1102 for the course research paper.  Writing the annotations helps with the next step of the research process, the literature review.  Since creating summaries and evaluating the source’s relevance to one’s topic, one is then able to easily organize the literature review.  Moreover, the annotations help one see which sources declare similar things and which ones contrast. The annotations help one get their thoughts down on paper and see if there are any gaps in the research information at hand.