Annotated Bibliographies

An annotated bibliography summarizes the salient points of a secondary resource in a critical fashion. Keep your audience in mind, who want to know what the article/book chapter is about, what kind of methodology it uses, and whether it is worth reading. Put the full citation of the article, book, or book chapter first, and then answer the following questions, in about 5 to 10 sentences:

1) What is the author's argument?

2) How does the author support this argument? What kinds of evidence does she use?

3) What does the author hope to accomplish by writing this piece? What kinds of biases might the author have?

4) Who is the author's audience? To what kind of scholarly debate is she contributing?

5) In what ways is this piece relevant for your own research question? You should carefully distinguish (in each and every sentence) which ideas can be attributed to one of these three authors, and which ideas are the product of your own thinking.

You must cite every time you report an author's ideas, not only by citing page numbers, but also by indicating through words and phrasing ("According to Smith's book Literature . . . "; "The author of this article argues . . . ") that you are reporting second-hand information. Failure to do so will result in a point being taken off every sentence that does not properly cite and attribute the source of ideas (a core tenet of academic writing).

Example of an annotated entry:

Schiller, Ben. “Learning Their Letters: Critical Literacy, Epistolary Culture, and Slavery in the Antebellum South.” Southern Quarterly 45.3 (2008): 11-20. Print.

According to Ben Schiller, the letters that slaves wrote to their masters in the antebellum South represented “public transcripts of domination” that were also influenced by the slaves’ own perspectives, which often conflicted with the views of their masters (15). Schiller argues that the epistolary culture of slaves who were required to be literate and compose letters to their masters reveals more about slavery and literacy than the “conventional sources and traditional narratives of resistance” (25). To support his argument, the author employs a series of letters that slaves wrote to their owners, whether to offer their owners support (Schiller 15), request hiring privileges (Schiller 17), or criticize them for turning their backs on the slaves during religious sermons (Schiller 22). Through his analysis of these letters, Schiller achieves his objective, which is to prove that the slaves’ epistles “are representative of the ways in which many enslaved black writers produced texts that disturbed the terms of their bondage, even as they worked within an epistolary culture that maintained and emphasized the imbalanced power dynamic of the master/slave relationship” (15). He also demonstrates how the epistolary form diverges from the “ literacy-as-resistance paradigm” (Schiller 13) because the slaves still had to use a courteous tone when writing to their masters (Schiller 23).

Since Schiller has a master’s degree in nationalism, he may be too focused on trying to establish a single national identity of literate slaves that is not representative of all letters slaves composed to their masters. Moreover, as a former reporter, Schiller could be adding his own slant to these strategically selected letters and analyzing them differently than how the slave writers intended for them to be read by their masters. Based on the journal that published this article, it seems Schiller’s intended audience is scholars who value art and history. From the nature of the article, readers may also infer that Schiller is writing to convince scholars to read slaves’ letters more critically. Schiller acknowledges that scholars often view slaves’ letters as forms of resistance (13), but encourages readers to understand how the letters balance “persuasive tactics” (Schiller 18) with “the bonds of deference and devotion that supposedly governed master/slave relations” (Schiller 16). Schiller’ s article can influence my research because he discusses literacy as a source of existential freedom (12) and survival (21), which is comparable to the function of literacy in Parable of the Sower. In addition, Schiller distinguishes between critical literacy, or the ability to enact change through reading and writing, and practical literacy, the simple ability to read and write (14). In Parable, Lauren’s critical literacy differentiates her from the other Earthseed community members, who want Lauren to teach them to read and write. Schiller explains how many of the privileged slaves used their ability to read and write to educate other slaves (20), which is precisely what Lauren does in Parable.