Assignment Sheet: Annotated Bibliography

Artist Profile Annotated Bibliography Instructions

You’ll be working for the rest of the semester to write an artist profile—an essay focusing on the musical artist of your choice that combines source material with your original thinking to discuss the artist’s life, art, ideas, and public persons with the goal of talking about other important issues or themes in the process. I’ll be giving you the full assignment sheet for the essay itself when the time comes, but we’ll begin by amassing your sources and creating an annotated bibliography.

Your annotated bibliography will amass your five sources for this artist profile, and present each source with proper MLA formatting and short paragraphs summarizing the source and discussing what it contributes to your larger project.

You will begin the bibliography with a ~100 word introduction explaining the project and its themes and goals. You will follow with an entry for each source.

Each entry will follow this format:

·      MLA Citation

·      Summary/Precis of ~100 words

·      ~ Source discussion of ~100 words

·      Set of five keywords from the source

We will follow the Purdue OWL guidelines for MLA-style bibliographies—you can find sample documents there, and we will review the basics in class.

You should amass the following sources for your AB:

·      A scholarly article (I will provide this)

·      An interview with your artist

·      A biographical source about your artist OTHER THAN an encyclopedia or Wikipedia.

·      An image of your artist

·      One of your artist’s social media (or equivalent) accounts

You should also prepare a playlist of five of your artist’s songs or videos. You do not need to do an AB entry for the songs, but you should provide the playlist, with a proper MLA-style entry for each song, at the end of the AB.

The challenge of this project is the push BEYOND the summary of your source and into real original thinking about how your source serves your project. This is the beginning of your CONVERSATION with your sources!

Basics:

·      MLA-style Annotated Biography

·      ~250 words per entry with breakdown described above for each entry

·      Third person (you’ll have the chance to use the first person in the actual essay!)

·      Carefully proofread

Go team!