What is an annotated bibliography? 

An annotated bibliography, as defined by the Purdue OWL Guide, is a list of sources that includes a summary and evaluation of each source. This includes every source you referenced, whether it is a photo, news article, scholarly paper, or tweet. Each of these types of sources requires different bits of information in the citation. Most of your sources will presumably be available online, so be sure to check the Citing Sources Guide or resources like Purdue OWL to see how you should cite sources like:

• Audiovisual materials like Movies, Photos, YouTube videos, Podcasts, or Music
• Sources that you find online, including anything web-based- from encyclopedia or Wikipedia entries, scholarly articles from a database, social media posts or Tweets, or a news article from a website.

• Summary: The summary paragraph should share:

• The author’s credentials (i.e. are they a professor? A journalist? A documentarian? A community historian?). These are just some examples. It is also important to note where they work, if relevant.

• What kind of source it is (primary, secondary, article, book, online website, etc.).

• Who published the source (if relevant).

• A brief summary of what the source says/communicates (2-3 sentences).

AND

• Evaluation: The evaluation paragraph is a crucial element of the annotated bibliography. It should share why this particular source is relevant, the overall effectiveness of the source (e.g. to inform, to convince, to teach, etc.), and how it could be important to understanding the topic at hand. Your evaluation will help justify and explain why you chose each source and help your reader know where to start if they want to learn more about your topic.

Here is an example:

Park, Jie Y. "Becoming Academically Literate." Journal of Adolescent &

Adult Literacy, vol. 57, no. 4, 2013, pp. 298-306.

Park’s article is unique in that she is writing in the U.S., but her case study is focused on the journey of an African immigrant to literacy.  She draws on Geisler’s definition of AL as expertise through learning the ways of the academy model. Park is using literacy in the singular, as a point of accomplishment  Within her case study, she recognizes how Tara (her case study student) enacts identity and joins a community of practice, as well as how Tara responds to specific “literacy events” (301 – from Heath 1983) as she interacts with texts or language.

Park uses this case study to point out differences between Tara’s learning in Africa vs. what she is experiencing within the U.S., noting how a “dual frame of reference” is needed for students to be able to navigate different disciplines’ writing assignments and form her identity as part of her acculturation (304). Park uses academic literacies in one of the more frequent ways I’ve seen it applied in US – that of second-language learning – bringing students “into” the academy from socialization and skills’ deficit approaches.  She is using the first two of Lea & Street’s three approaches, but aligning them together into academic literacy; however, she is not drawing in any of the multimodal aspects or advanced metacognitive elements that scaffold to the third approach as a separate learning stage, as opposed to just the umbrella term for the two lower-tiered approaches of skill-building and socialization.