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Annotated Bibliographies: Final checklist

Learn how to find and organise the most relevant, most useful and most up-to-date sources for your topic

Why all the questions?

Before you hand a project in, always read through it again to catch any errors you missed, as those little things like misspellings and grammatical slips detract from the quality of the work you've done. Remember the old Ford motto: "The quality goes in before the name goes on."

Final checklist

CONTENT: Does it cover your topic fairly completely? Are all major points of view represented and/or identified? If not, do you inform your reader in the Introduction or otherwise?

STYLE: Are your comments consistent in voice, tone, and level of language? Is the bibliography well organised? Does it follow a logical sequence, whether organised alphabetically, informationally, chronologically, or otherwise?

FORM: Are your comments grammatically correct? Spelling? Punctuation? Is the work organised, spaced and punctuated accurately and consistently, according to the style manual you are using?

OVERALL: Would your bibliography be helpful to someone who wanted to find out which materials might give a good representation of the information available on this specific topic (within the limits you have defined)? Would you find it useful if you were writing a paper on this topic?

 

Read through your work and consider the above questions. Can you answer yes to all of them? 

Then put it away for a while and read it again later with a clear, rested head. Do you like it? Print the hand-in version. If not, figure out why and fix the problems. 

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