University of California International Student Challenges Annotate Bibliography Paper

For your Annotated Bibliography Entry assignment, you will write a summary section (descriptive summary) AND a critique section (evaluative summary) for one of the articles on Canvas intended for the upcoming Investigative Essay assignment.

(The choice of the article for summarizing, assessing, and evaluating in this Annotated Bibliography Entry will depend on your personal preferences and on the connections of its content with the topic of your upcoming investigative essay.)

You should include or consider the following:

• A header in MLA format.
• A full reference to the original article in MLA style.
• In your summary (150-200 words), you should present the purpose of the research and its topic, the main points of the article, and conclude with a description of the key finding(s) or conclusion(s). Make sure that all major ideas from your article are mentioned in the article. All other usual summary guidelines (see, for instance, Summary 1 Assignment Sheet for our class) apply to the summary section of the annotated bibliography entry too.
• For the critique section (100-150 words), make sure that you pick the most important points mentioned in the bullet points in the video “Annotated Bibliography – Evaluation” (Annotated Bibliography – Evaluation (Links to an external site.)) and write critical sentences about what you found. For the general assessment, you may decide to mention some details about the potential audience of the article and about the credibility of its authors, the reliability of the research and the findings presented in the article, whether the topic of the research seems to be relevant and up-to-date, if it’s published in an authoritative source, etc. In the personal evaluation, you are welcome to discuss how the source can be important to your upcoming investigative essay, what position the author of the article takes towards its subject, if you agree or disagree with the author’s argument, how it relates and compares to the other sources, and/or what gaps it might leave in the research.
• Make sure to explain the reasons for your general assessments and personal evaluations of the article which you plan to include in your annotated bibliography entry.
• In your annotated bibliography, you can put your descriptive and evaluative summaries separately; in such a case, they will follow one after the other (like in the example provided in the Annotated Bibliography Entry 2 Assignment Sheet after the evaluation rubric there). You can also start with some general assessment of the original article, and then to proceed to the summary and to some other, more specific general assessments and personal evaluations of the source (like in most of the examples in our related class handouts).
• Be precise with your language and give details when needed.