Impact of Student Loan Debt on College Financial Well being Annotated Bibliography – Description
Annotated Bibliography/Source Evaluations
Finding relevant, high-quality scholarly sources should be one of your first orders of business once you’ve identified a topic. It is especially important when you begin your research that you find recent sources, the fresher the better. You can then mine the bibliographies of those sources to identify other potentially relevant material. Be sure to avoid writing evaluations of background sources (Wikipedia, About.com, etc.), as you will not receive any credit for evaluating them. If you are unsure about a source, consider asking a librarian, or come by my office hours to discuss your research.
The majority of each source evaluation should simply consist of notes that you think will be helpful when you draft your CP and AP essays. You can paraphrase and summarize arguments, pull important quotations, list page numbers that identify significant passages—whatever you see fit. In addition to these notes, I want you to write a very short annotation. For each source, write a paragraph that follows this five-point format in this exact order:
After giving the bibliographic entry—in MLA format—for the source, explain in one sentence each:
See the Purdue OWL website for help with MLA formatting.
1. Who the author(s) is/are, and what his/her/their qualifications are.
Use Google or Wikipedia to check up on qualifications—where do they work? what degrees do they hold? area of expertise? major awards (Nobel, Pulitzer, etc.)?
2. What the article or book’s thesis/central argument/topic is (in your own words).
Don’t read through the whole source and only then start thinking about your source evaluation. The thesis will usually appear in the introduction to a scholarly article. Underline or highlight it during your initial read-through so you won’t have to go back and hunt for it when you’re done. Some sources (including from journalism, advocacy, government documents, etc.) won’t have an explicit argument. In that case, describe the topic of the source as specifically as possible.
3. What kind of evidence is used to support this thesis/account of a topic (anecdotal? interviews? historical research? experiments?).
Look at both the article/chapter/book itself and its footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, or works cited page; doing so will allow you to see what material the author cites in the article, be it scholarly work from the humanities, social sciences, STEM, and so forth. Also keep an eye out for graphic evidence. Many of your sources will use multiple types of evidence. Take note when they do.
4. The purpose, as you understand it, of this publication.
Think about general categories of purpose (to persuade, inform, create artistic expression, etc.), and also think in terms of audience: what community is the author trying to reach, and how is he/she/they trying to affect that community’s understanding of or attitudes toward the topic?
5. The source’s credibility, including identifying any biases or deficiencies in the work.
The post Impact of Student Loan Debt on College Financial Well being Annotated Bibliography first appeared on .
