FIRST PARAGRAPH(S). This is a draft, not the final version of your introduction (you even might end up discarding it all together ultimately). The goal of this assignment is for you to start thinking about the best way to initiate your argument and which strategy of development would be most effective to that end. Despite the fact that this is a draft, however, the prose should be of good quality and the paragraph in general should be as focused, specific, and well-written as possible.

The thesis statement in your introduction should be underlined or italicized. If your thesis is implied, please write it out at the bottom of the page, underneath your introduction.

This assignment should be posted in your personal space when completed.

THE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. Annotated bibliographies are valuable resources for both readers and writers. For a reader, they offer information about sources that can facilitate that person's own research. For a writer, it is useful to annotate sources as a pre-writing strategy to help process information contained in a source and to begin to consider ways to apply that information to a paper's argument.

The goals of this assignment are to urge students to consider the rhetorical stance and point of view of their sources, to further the development of their own thesis statements and research arguments, and to introduce them to the practice of annotating sources as part of the research process.

For this assignment, you will select those 8 sources that you consider to be most important to your research project at this time -- these sources may differ from those that you included on your preliminary bibliography. Familiarize yourself with the information contained in these sources and write an annotation for each citation. You should produce a list that contains both secondary and (where appropriate) primary sources.

THE CITATIONS. The citations themselves should look identical to those in the Preliminary Bibliography (although they should be corrected if there were any formatting mistakes). However, please follow each citation with a parenthetical reference indicating whether it is a primary or secondary source (see chapter 5 of Envision for clarification on the difference between primary and secondary sources). For instance, a citation on a Dickens novel for a research paper on his late fiction might read as follows:

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY: Penguin Classics, 1989. (primary)

THE ANNOTATIONS. The annotations that follow each citation should consist of two to three complete sentences (be concise) that summarize the main points of the text's argument and its relevance to your project.

When you have completed this assignment, post it as an attachment under your PERSONAL WORK folder on Panfora.