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Annotated Bibliographies

General guidelines for writing annotations for your sources.

Annotation examples

Always check with your assignment requirements

  • Your professor may want full-page annotations or may only want certain info in the annotations
  • Craft your ideas into coherent, flowing sentences and paragraphs whatever the requirements

Standard paragraph-length annotations

It is generally standard for an annotation to be 200-250 words (one paragraph). Below is a real 7-source annotated bibliography. Check it out to see how the format and sentence structure work.

Full-page annotations

This is an example of one full-length annotation. Notice how, by the time the author reaches the end, they have answered all 9 of the Engeldinger questions.

Also notice how the answers to the questions are implicit--the student has written sentences that weave the answers together as a coherent annotation and not as a patched-together list of information.

In MLA style.

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