Tuesday’s blog post includes a sample annotated bibliographic entry for a research project devoted to David Sedaris’s writing. Today’s post features a second sample, one for a study of Helen Keller’s prose. As you continue to compile your own bibliography, look to this sample and Tuesday’s sample as models. Also refer to the samples in the model paper that I distributed in class yesterday and posted to Blackboard.
Note that the sample below lacks the indentations that will appear in the entries in your MS Word and PDF files. The first section of the bibliographic entry, the publication information, will have a hanging indent. The first lines of the summary and commentary paragraphs that follow will be indented five spaces or one-half inch.
Sample Annotated Bibliographic Entry
Werner, Marta L. “Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Writing Otherwise.” Textual Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-45. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/tex.2010.5.1.1. Accessed 7 Nov. 2024.
In “Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan: Writing Otherwise,” Marta L. Werner traces the evolution of Keller’s writing from the words she first spelled with her fingers to the typewritten narratives she later produced. Werner observes that the typewriter enabled Keller “to translate the private tactile language of finger spelling into the public, visual code of print” (14).
Werner is a professor of English and the Svalgic Chair in Textual Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of several book-length studies of Emily Dickinson’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing, most recently The Master Hours of Emily Dickinson (2021). “Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan: Writing Otherwise” illuminates the differences between Keller’s early and later modes of writing and demonstrates how the latter gave her private world a public life. In Werner’s words, “without a typewriter, it seems entirely possible that she would not have become an autobiographer” (16).
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, and review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
Jane Lucas 