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Ciara Villarreal

ENGL 1302-231

Sharity Nelson

11 February 2024

Creating an Annotated Bibliography: A Reflection Essay

In this first writing assignment, I learned about annotated bibliographies. Before

attending this course, an annotated bibliography seemed intimidating and difficult to complete,

but it was much simpler than I had imagined after sitting down and slowly going through the

process. This course taught me that when doing academic research, it is essential to check if the

articles are peer-reviewed, not a literature review, and always ensure the article will benefit the

research. Everything I learned in this course will help me when doing academic research in other

courses when producing writing tasks. For example, in my UNIV 1302 course, we will create an

annotated bibliography on music therapy, which will require knowledge of academic research.

Thanks to the new knowledge I gained on academic research for this first writing assignment in

ENGL 1302, my research skills are more developed, which will help me acquire the right

sources for my UNIV 1302 research.

Creating an annotated bibliography helps gain perspective through other professional

sources, such as peer-reviewed articles. To a reader, it provides a brief overview of research on

any given topic. Writing annotated bibliographies will also allow for the development of a writer

in reading and summarizing/annotating articles and research skills in general. An annotated

bibliography also establishes your credibility as a writer. Research is done that will back up your

main argument. After gaining perspective of other people's arguments and finding the problems

from your topic, you will be able to completely construct your own point of view and beliefs.
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The setup of an annotated bibliography is exceptionally organized and helps a writer keep

everything in order. For future writing tasks and research, the set up of an annotated bibliography

I learned from this course will allow me to produce well-organized and researched writing,

which will benefit my UNIV 1302 research.

Conferencing with Dr. Nelson allowed me to fix my citations and improve my annotated

bibliography overall. In my draft, I changed how some of my citations were cited. Dr. Nelson

pointed out that I did not include the last name of the author in either the sentence or in-text

citation, so she recommended I add it to the in-text citation to simplify my future writing tasks. I

also realized that some of my sources were not placed in alphabetical order, so I went ahead and

made that change as well. I made these changes to correct my mistakes and fulfill the

expectations of a well-written annotated bibliography. The conferencing period is a very good

way to gain perspective from Dr. Nelson, yet I believe it would be helpful if we had more time to

ask questions. Since I did not ask many questions during the conferencing period, I was left with

some confusion regarding my annotated bibliography draft. The peer review session allowed me

to clear my confusion.

The peer review allowed me to learn what my paper looked like through someone else's

eyes. Doing peer review during class also allowed me to converse with my peer review partner

and notice what were the key problems in my draft. I had initially submitted an incomplete

version of my annotated bibliography draft, so my peer review partner allowed me to understand

how to continue the draft. They also recommended I go back and change some of my vocabulary

to make my writing sound more professional and concise. They also recommended that I add the

reason for choosing the source, how it will help my research, and how it will be used. While

making the recommended changes, I noticed that some of my sources were too lengthy and
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others were too short. Therefore, I decided to shorten some by removing wordy sentences or

information that did not benefit the annotation. I also went back to some annotations and articles

and added more information to them.

The most challenging aspect of this writing assignment was deciding what way to format

or summarize the actual annotations. Even though I knew what I wanted to take from each

annotation, it was a bit difficult to actually put all the information together into the annotation.

Another difficult part was staying within the word count limits. I felt that there was so much

information to be limited to only 200 words; maybe extending the word limit to 250 words next

time would be better. Another difficult part was deciding what information was right for the

annotations, as there is so much in one article. By this, I mean including specific data or only the

general parts of the article, yet that would make the annotated bibliography sound redundant and

repetitive. The least challenging aspect of this writing assignment was collecting articles to add

to the annotated bibliography. It was quite simple to search for the articles on the Killam Library

database. Personally, I used the Academic Search Complete, which helped me locate all the

articles I used in the bibliography.

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Works Cited

Villarreal, Ciara. “Annotated Bibliography: Draft 1.” 2 February 2024. ENGL 1302, Texas A&M

International University, homework assignment.

Villarreal, Ciara. “Annotated Bibliography: Draft 1, Peer Review” 2 February 2024. ENGL

1302, Texas A&M International University, In-class activity.

Villarreal, Ciara. “Annotated Bibliography: Final Draft 1.” 9 February 2024. ENGL 1302, Texas

A&M International University.

Nelson, Sharity. “Conference time” 5 February 2024 ENGL 1302, Texas A&M International

University, in-class activity.

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