The purpose of annotations is to give the reader relevant information about each source you have consulted. There are two main types of annotation.
Descriptive annotations simply describe your sources, briefly summarizing their arguments and ideas. They are useful for keeping a record of your reading and giving a quick overview of sources related to your topic.
Evaluative annotations go into more detail and provide your own perspective on each source. For example, you may:
Check the requirements of your assignment to find out whether you need to write descriptive or evaluative annotations.
Annotations can vary in length according to the approach taken and the length of the source. You may write a couple of sentences describing the argument of an essay, or several paragraphs summarizing and evaluating a book.
A good guideline is to aim for 50 to 200 words for each source. Consult your instructor to check how long your annotated bibliography should be and how many sources you need to include.
Each entry starts with a Chicago style citation, which gives full publication details of the source. The citation is formatted the same as a normal bibliography entry:
The annotation appears on a new line directly after the source citation. The whole annotation is indented, to make it clear when the annotation ends and a new source appears.
According to Turabian guidelines, annotations should be formatted the same as the main text of any paper:
From: Scribbr
Here is an example of an annotated bibliography entry in Chicago author-date style.
Wilson, John, P. 2001. When the Texans Came: Missing Records from the Civil War in the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
This book contains 282 original letters, song lyrics, casualty lists, transcripts of witness testimony, original newspaper accounts. It’s a supplement to the anthology published in 128 volumes “The War of the Rebellion: A compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies”. The author is a historian-archaeologist. This book is an excellent source for primary documents and offers a fresh narrative of the civil war in the New Mexico territory. Many people think of the Civil War as a battle between the Union and the Confederacy. This book gives the Civil War history researcher a glimpse at the battles happening in the Southwest, as well.
