Monday in class, after your Scrabble debriefing, you read a sample final essay and annotated bibliography written by a student last semester. After you read and took notes on that sample assignment, you and two or three of your classmates collaboratively composed a one-paragraph assessment of it. Among the points that some of you addressed in your assessments include these:
- The writer does mention her interest in whether writing longhand is more beneficial that typing, but she does not move beyond the simple either/or notion of the subject. A more substantive introduction would find her posing such questions as, in what contexts might writing longhand prove more beneficial than typing, and in what other contexts might the opposite be the case? The choice of sources might shed light on that, but her bibliography lacks a variety of perspectives. All of the sources except her interview with a classmate focus on published authors’ pereferences for beginning the writing process by composing longhand.
- The final essay does not include the minimum requirement of two quotations (one quotation from one source, a second from a second source), and the quotation is not followed by a parenthetical citation.
- The bibliography does meet the five-source minimum, but the sources are not presented in the correct order. They should be alphabetized by the authors’ last names.
- One of the bibliographic entries does not include the author’s name.
- The publication/interview information for each source is followed by a paragraph of summary and a second paragraph of commentary, but the commentaries are insufficient. Rather than offering some assessment of the source (explaining its usefulness, comparing it to another source), the commentaries primarily reiterate the ideas presented in the summaries that precede them.
- The final essay and annotated bibliography is marred by errors of diction, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and style. The mistake of writing the word cancer, instead of the intended word, chance, is an egregious error of diction (par. 4).
Additional Research and Writing
This morning we will review the points outlined above, and you will have the remainder of the class period to conduct additional research and compose additional portions of your final essay and annotated bibliography. Tasks to undertake include these:
- Using the HPU Libraries databases to locate additional sources.
- If the subject of your final essay/annotated bibliography has a Wikipedia page, locating that page, scrolling down to the list of references, and identifying one that might serve as one of your sources.
- Using Google Scholar to locate a potential source.
- Composing an annotation for one of your sources.
- Reviewing the sources you have gathered and noting what similarities and differences you can identify among them. Those similarities and differences may serve as material for your essay or your commentaries.
Next Up
When class resumes next Wednesday, you will have additional time for locating sources and composing annotations for your final essay and annotated bibliography.
Jane Lucas 