LING 599 VNL Seminar 1

Annotated bibliography requirements

Please read the general information about annotated bibliographies on the Purdue OWL
site.
Start at: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/01/ There are several pages, so
keep clicking Next at the bottom of the page. There are some sample annotations there as
well.
The purpose of this assignment is for you to read widely around your tentative thesis
topic so that you have a good idea of what the issues are around your topic and what kind
of research is already published. If you read widely and carefully it should help you find
the research gap. You do not have to go to the next stage, which is a literature review. You
will do that next semester. But when preparing a literature review, you first need to know
what other researchers have said about your topic. Wide reading is needed at this stage. If
you have some tentative research questions, this will help you search using keywords, but
you should not go too narrow too quickly.
The Annotated Bibliography is a list of published materials that are relevant to your topic.
You will eventually arrange the most relevant of these into a literature review (You will
also want to add other articles and books to the lit review but this is a start)
Think about these questions:
What is known already about my topic?
Are there any important books (monographs or edited collections) on my topic that
should be consulted?
What research articles are there?
What differing opinions are out there?
How to organize the Annotated Bibliography
Provide a meaningful title for your A.Bib. that reflects your proposed research area.
Organize alphabetically by first-mentioned authors surname.
Provide the full APA citation as a sub-heading for each entry.
You should bold this citation so we can easily see the different entries.
Write a good paragraph (using your own words) on each source. The number of words
will vary- some will be just a few lines, others, a few hundred words, but as a general
guide, aim for 250 words per entry. I want 10 good sources!
Build your annotation around answering these questions:
1. What is this text about? (summarize)
2. What is the scope of the text? (i.e. how broad, how detailed?)
3. Is the source important because of theory, research methods, research findings,
controversy, or something else?
4. How useful is it likely to be to my research?