by Andrew Craig, History

During the second week of HIST 3095: History of Southern Food—the course I’m serving as a WIP TA for this semester—I asked students to complete a written survey rating their comfort level with different aspects of writing a history research paper. On a scale of 1 through 5, students ranked their experience and comfort level with various stages of the writing process, like gathering sources and developing thesis statements, as well as the four major assignments, scaffolded to help them develop an original research paper and graded throughout the semester. Compiling their responses, I found that the annotated bibliography was one aspect of the historical writing process that the majority of students anticipating being the most challenging.

I admittedly neglected the annotated bibliographies I was tasked with as an undergraduate writer. I viewed them as little more than busy work assigned by the professor to ensure I’d gather a least a couple useful sources in preparation for the big essay due at the end of the semester. In my experience as a graduate teaching assistant, I’ve learned there’s truth to that in some cases. However, I recently realized that as I’ve grown as a writer during my M.A. and Ph.D. programs, annotated bibliographies have come to play an important role in my writing process.

After guidelines were posted for the bibliography in HIST 3095, the anxiety in the classroom about the assignment became more palpable by the day. Nervously, students requested a model they could use on multiple occasions as the due date for the annotated bibliography approached. So, I dug through my files and found an annotated bibliography that I’d written for a seminar during my master’s program for them to reference as an example for formatting the two key aspects of their bibliographies—the citations and annotations.

This example became the foundation of a workshop that I taught a week before the assignment was due. Before walking them through how to craft their own annotations, I explained to students why writing this particular bibliography had proven to be such a useful exercise for me in the early stages of writing my master’s thesis on the development of industrial hog farms in North Carolina. Not only did it force me to gather relevant sources, but my annotations about those sources helped me start writing the rough drafts of the literature review that was due for the seminar I was taking that semester, the historiographical section of my thesis introduction, as well as numerous essays and grant proposals during my doctoral coursework.

Most of my example annotations are far from perfect, but I think this is partially why they prove to be a useful model for students who are also in the early stages of developing a historical research project. Despite a handful of typos and muddled sentences, my example annotations all exhibit the three qualities of a good annotation that will continue to prove useful in the future:

• They summarize the source’s main argument.
• They briefly unpack the source’s logic and explain why the author finds the subject significant.
• They explain how the sources connect to my project and potentially other sources included in the bibliography.

(They do, of course, also include a properly formatted citation!)

In the process of preparing for this workshop, I realized that annotated bibliographies have become an indispensable part of my own writing process. Imperfect as they might be, writing annotations helps me collect my thoughts and notes about my sources in an organized format that I can readily copy and paste into my essay once I start drafting it later. Though I have to revise and edit my original annotations each time I used them this way—the process of doing so at an early stage of the writing process has become instrumental in helping me work out how I was going to use each of my sources, and what my particular contribution to the scholarship was going to be. By doing this work—beginning to explain my sources in writing before I start using them as evidence—I have often found that my thesis statements become stronger because I can focus more on my argument once I start drafting.