How to write an annotated bibliography in Turabian

Monday, Oct. 3rd 2011

For how to write an annotated bibliography in Turabian first thing to do would be to explain that a bibliography can be defined as the list of works of a specific author that includes critical or explanatory notes and passages.

With the list of authors, books, articles and documents you must also write descriptive and evaluative paragraphs of around 150 words regarding the annotation. This informs the reader of the relevance, accuracy and the quality of the sources that you selected and quoted.

Now select a topic that you can easily handle and select your sources of information. Read the selected information thoroughly, because without acquiring the requisite knowledge or information it can be pretty difficult to write about your topic. You must arrange the selected entries in an alphabetical order, normally by the name of the authors whose works have been selected for the article.

Next for writing an annotated bibliography in Turabian, when abstracts or descriptive summaries must be written at the beginning of the journal articles in publication in an alphabetical list of topics or indexes, depicting the author’s view on the subject and also explaining these views and his knowledge or authority on the subject.

A source is usually appraised by reading the bibliographic citation for the name of the author, title and publication information. This will help in determining the usefulness of that source for your bibliography in the same way that you can appraise a web site by reading the home page thoroughly.

Publication information is required such as whether this is a first publication as sources may be revised in further publications. Sources may be revised or updated and there might be changes in information and some sources might even have to be omitted. Frequent printing of the work indicates that is reliable and has become a standard source of information.

If the work has been published by a university press, then it there are great possibilities that it is a scholarly work. For writing an annotated bibliography in Turabian, it is not necessary that if the publisher is reputed then that does not necessarily guarantee quality, it only shows that the publisher has enough regard for the source to publish the work. Consider the type of audience that the author is targeting. Is the audience general or specialized? Consider also that the work is suitable for your needs, and is not too advanced.