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ENGL 015: Rhetoric and Composition (Ringle)

MLA Annotated Bibliography

For this assignment, I am asking you to use the Penn State catalog and electronic databases to create a Research Bibliography. This bibliography will be comprised of a body of articles and/or books you have found on your chosen topic in relation to your third essay assignment. Once you determine the narrowed topic of Paper 3, you will choose your Works Cited entries from this larger bibliography.

Requirements

1. First, select a general topic(s) to research. The topic should be related to our third essay assignment on The Climate Crisis. Additionally, the topic will guide your investigation, and help you arrive at the more specific subject/question you will address in your research paper.

2. Use the PSU catalog and databases to locate sources related to your chosen topic. You must have a total of ten sources (5 points each), including the following:

  • At least three articles from peer reviewed journals or magazines.
  • At least one article from a newspaper.
  • All of your sources must have been published within the last decade.
  • All sources must be reputable, credible, and reliable. (No Wikipedia or Google Books)

3. Create a Bibliography page in which you arrange all your sources according to MLA format.

4. Beneath each source, create an annotation (no more than a paragraph) explaining the quality of the source, summarizing the content of the source and explaining why it has been useful to you as a researcher. Briefly describe what the article is about and how it relates to your topic. Summarize in your own words. DO NOT cut-and-paste the abstracts from search engines or journals. DO NOT include sources that have been of no help to you, or that simply repeat the same information found in an earlier source.

SAMPLE CITATION & ANNOTATION:

Welsh, Roger L.  Cather’s Kitchens: Foodways in Literature and Life.  2nd ed. 
       
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.  Print.

This book explores the cultural role of food in the novels of Willa Cather.  Specifically, it argues that food helps to build bridges between characters of different backgrounds and ethnicities; such "foodways" cross standard social boundaries such as race, gender, and religion.  I believe this work will be useful to my project as it shows that food plays an important cultural role: not just in terms of nourishment, but also regarding community and social identity.  I anticipate using this source when discussing representations of food in American popular culture.