BA #5 - Critical Bibliographic Essay Preparation

This assignment should be posted to your own blog by 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, 3/10/11.

Purpose and Context

The fifth Blogging Assignment asks you to justify and discuss how 2 of your research sources help you to flesh out your issue. The emphasis is on how well you can discuss your sources analytically to demonstrate what they contribute to your research. This is primarily an opportunity for you to make sense of some of your research sources so far, especially by reading them perspectivally and multivocally. This is secondarily an opportunity for me to give you early feedback before you submit the Critical Bibliographic Essay, so I encourage you to do as well as you possibly can.

Please select at least 1 of your sources from our coursepack.

The Assignment

After introducing your issue, bring 2 sources into conversation to help you discover something new about it. As we have done earlier in the semester, you may use one source as a lens for interpreting the other source in order to understand how both relate in a significant way. But this time, you will develop this relationship by providing more detail about how the author of each source supports his or her own claims, and how the sources work together to develop knowledge on your issue. In relating them, you should look beyond the simple and toward the complex, i.e., beyond just determining on what they agree or disagree, and beyond making a simple statement of how they approach a topic differently. For example, you might consider how their claims illuminate one another on your issue, how they offer new ways of thinking about each other on your issue, how certain concepts contribute to each other and to your issue, etc. As always, please treat and discuss these sources as authored texts, referring explicitly to the authors and their claims.

Evaluation Criteria

This assignment will be evaluated according to the “plus” system discussed on page 4 of our syllabus. The assignment is fairly flexible and I will accept a broad range of responses. Please be original, but please keep in mind the following criteria:

• Depth of Response – your response to this assignment demonstrates an in-depth reading of 2 sources and how they contribute to your issue, and demonstrates your ability to work with particular passages or concepts, rather than to do a superficial reading
  
• Focus and Coherence – your response is thesis-driven (even if that thesis statement is implicit) and your supporting claims are well organized to develop that thesis
  
• Evidence and Justification – your response provides and appropriately cites specific passages from both texts to illustrate the claims you want to make
  
• Clarity and Style – your paragraphs are well focused, your sentences are grammatically sound, and your writing has a sense of polish, as if you have thought carefully about what you want to say and how you need to say it
  
• Blogging Guidelines – your assignment follows these and uses them to your advantage