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last.updated 8.15.07

Progressive Annotated Bibliography

Purpose

Throughout the semester the instructor has provided you with readings that cover the history and breadth of composition studies relationship to rhetoric. As you become immersed in both these discussions and the profession, you will want to pursue other perspectives or focus on specific issues (e.g., ethos, kairos, institutions, dialect).

The Progressive Annotated Bibliography gives you the opportunity to expand yours and your peers' knowledge of composition studies. You will want to use these sources to both enrich your contribution to class discussions and to support the documents that you draft for this class. Likewise, you will be posting your entry to a public space on Blackboard, which will allow your peers to see other perspectives in these fields. The progressive nature of these submissions allows you to use the instructor's comments on previous submissions to decide how you will compose latter submissions.

Instructions-Choosing Articles

For your entries, you will want to find five academic, refereed articles or chapters about rhetoric and/or composition. Refereed scholarship is scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies that have been judged worthy of publication by other experts in this field. Texts that qualify include...

• academic journal articles
• chapters from an edited collection
• chapters from an academic monographs (no more than two chapters per book)

Texts that do not qualify include...

• most popular publications (consult instructor)
• newsletters
• book reviews
• academics' websites

These list, of course, are not exhaustive. If you have any questions whether an article or chapter qualifies, consult the instructor.

You should choose the texts...

• based upon issues that you are interested in learning more about
• based upon positions/philosophies that you want to both support and refute
• that are fairly recent (1990-2007), unless you are working with seminal pieces
• that have not been annotated by your peers in previous weeks; one purpose of this assignment is to develop a extensive resource for the class.

Variations from these parameters are acceptable, but consult the instructor first.

Instructions-Writing (Progressive Submissions)

For each annotation entry, you will want to...

• Compose a bibliographic citation for the article you have read. You should use MLA or APA formatting; be consistent.
• Under each citation write a 250 word annotation for that article. For each entry...
  
  • identify the author's argument (sometimes it will be explicit; other times it will be inferred)
  • brieflysummarize the main points that the author makes to support the argument
  • briefly review the article: Is this scholarship useful ? Why? (You are encouraged to use the first-person singular pronoun to distinguish your voice from the author(s) you are reviewing)

While these three points need to be addressed, this list does not define the order in which these points need to be presented.

Criteria

Logistic:

• no more than 250 words per entry; this is an exercise in writing brief, yet detailed texts
• single spaced

• The five submission deadlines for the annotated bibliography are...

  • September 12, 2007
  • September 26 , 2007
  • October 2 , 2007
  • October 23, 2007
  • October 30, 2007

  Use the Blackboard "Discussion Board" to post your entry to the instructor and the class. You will submit all of your entries in the body of a discussion board post. The program may shift some of the formatting and change some characters if you cut and paste from MS Word; do not sweat this.

• The PAB assignment will cumulatively be worth 50 points. All students will start with 40 points and your grade will be adjusted according to the evaluation of each of the five entries. Each entry will be graded using the following scale...

  check (or 0) = You did the work satisfactorily and on time. If it is an earlier entry, use the instructor's comments to guide how you compose future entries

  +1, +2= You demonstrated various degrees of engagement with the ideas and you turned it in on time. Use features that the instructor liked as a model for future entries

  –1, -2= Your work demonstrates a misunderstanding of the assignment or minimal effort, shows that you do not understand what an academic text entails, or was not turned in on time.

  - 4 = No submission

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

• a sense of audience–do you provide enough information and detail about the article that your audience of peers gets a clear sense of the article's content? Likewise do you only highlight important information?
• an informed understanding and discussion of rhetoric and composition, as well as other topics the text covers
• do you provide a substantiated opinion of the text?
• appropriate use of conventions, including MLA or APA citation formatting