Hello, everyone! Class this week is entirely asynchronous. I will be away, so we won't have a Zoom session. However, the materials you'll find below are very important, because they're going to help you understand what an annotated bibliography is. If you're taking a QEP-designated course this semester, you have an annotated bibliography assignment due at the end of the semester. If you're not taking a QEP-designated course this semester, you will do so at least twice while you're at UPSem. So please watch the video on annotated bibliographies and do that reading particularly carefully. If you have questions, please bring them to class during our next session!
Read: “A Guide to Annotated Bibliographies” (George Mason University): https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/research-based-writing/a-guide-to-annotated-bibliographies
Read: “Writing a Literature Review” (George Mason University): https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/writing-resources/research-based-writing/writing-a-literature-review
Note: The focus of this video is on articles in the fields of science and social science. You’ll find a lot of overlap here with Christian education and pastoral care articles. On the other hand, articles in the humanities — which includes biblical studies, church history, and theology — often have slightly different structures. They will still have abstracts and identifiable introductions and conclusions, but they lack methods and results sections. Instead they tend to break down the content of an overall scholarly argument into smaller sub-arguments, and those smaller arguments are the sections of the paper.
The file below contains an example of a short research bibliography and a very short annotated bibliography. You'll notice that only one of the sources on the annotated bibliography is also on the research bibliography. That's because research is iterative, and between creating the research bibliography and progressing to the annotated one, you will keep searching out new sources and weeding out sources that you thought would be helpful but which turned out not to be.
Notice too that the annotations summarize the core argument of a source, identify on strengths and weaknesses of the argument, and address how the source will be useful to the present research project. These are the most important features of an annotated bibliography. Beyond this -- especially if the annotated bibliography is for your own research use rather than a formal assignment -- you can include anything you think is useful to know or remember about a source you're using.