Annotated Bibliography and first paragraph of paper to be submitted in class April 1
As discussed in class, on Tuesday, April 1 (and this is not a joke), you will submit 10 bibliographic entries that you have culled from your initial research on your object. You will supply information about 5 of those entries.
The list of ten entries that you supply will come from the sorts of reputable, refereed sources that we discussed in class. That is, no Google, no Yahoo, and no other search engine that is not specifically designed to turn up reliable scholarly materials vetted by professionals in the field.
Your entries must conform either to Chicago or MLA style (and you'll find a link to MLA in the "Course Resources and Announcements" section in the Navigation toolbar to your left), and they must be presented accordingly. You must also indicate after each entry where you found it (e.g., MLA database), and which search terms you used to produce that entry (e.g., "novel" AND "French" AND "scary").
For five of the entries, you will supply two or three sentences indicating what the source is about and what its principal argument—its thesis—is. What is the one thing that this source argues and/or discusses that makes it unique? That's what your two or three sentences will explain.
Then: you will write the first paragraph of your paper and bring it to class on Tuesday, along with your bibliography. I recommend that you re-read the first few pages of the articles on The Awakening that we read for class to see how professionals introduce their topics. You will need to boil down your introduction to a single paragraph—for the purposes of this exercise, in any event, for you will be free to expand your introduction later on—and your introduction will need to (a) have a strong, cogent, identifiable thesis and (b) give your reader some idea of how you're approaching the material and why it matters that you're approaching it this way.
Is this hard? You bet. Is it too early to be starting this? You must be kidding.
On Tuesday, you will work with a partner of my choosing in class on your first paragraph to whip it into shape.