How to make an entry for an annotated bibliography

The purpose of an annotated bibliography is to help you keep track of what you’ve read. When you’re working on a large, long-term project that involves reading lots and lots of texts, it can be difficult to remember who talked about what, what your opinion of the text was, what uses it might have, and so on. Keeping track of reading only becomes more important when you’re working with a research group, since something that you read today might turn out to be useful to someone else in the group a month from now.

So, in order that we keep track of our text-based research for this term, we’ll all annotate what we read. Your annotations should be 250-750 words in length. (Length will vary depending on what you read: for example, my sample annotation of Shipler's book is about 750 words, but an annotation of a single article might only run four or five hundred words). Regardless of length, each annotation should cover three topics:

1. A summary of the content of the piece you've read. This section should describe the basic idea of the piece, focusing on its main argument and its approach to the topic.
2. Your analysis of the piece. This section should explain what you feel to be the piece’s strengths and weaknesses, both in terms of substance (i.e., what it argues) and its presentation style (i.e., how it presents that argument). In other words, you’ll want to evaluate the piece both as someone interested in the issues and as someone interested in learning to become a more effective writer.
3. A description of the uses of the piece. This section should focus on what you/we can do with the text, both as scholar-activists and as writers. What use does the text have to someone wanting to learn more and act upon the issue that the text takes up? And what can we learn from the text that will help us to research and write more effectively.

Each annotation should begin with an MLA-style citation of the text, and then proceed through the three sections. There’s a helpful guide to MLA citation at the Purdue OWL site. (Look on the list of topics on the left for guidance on specific citation topics.)

You'll find my annotation of David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor below. It's a longer one (since I'm annotating a book), but it should give you a general idea of what to aim for.

Sample Annotation - Working Poor by writRHET