Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The Paper of Doom

While working on my paper on bibliography I have been having trouble finding articles that relate to the direction that I have wanted to go, which is that bibliographies are more than just a way to find the sources that others have used to write on their topics.
The only book that I have found that is truly useful is a book that was written in 1934. I found this really funny cause the book had stamped in the front April 4 1954. The fact that I was using a book that my great grandma could have been using really amused me.
The good thing that happened for me was that Professor Burton recommended a number of people that I could contact to interview them about bibliographies. I was able to contact Robert Means and he spent time with me discussing bibliographies. He made a number of really good points, which I shall let you know more about when I use them in my paper.
Here is the start of my paper I may end up changing it completely around after my interview but I wasn’t able to interview Professor Means before the rough draft was due. If anyone has any pointer on what I could do or use to better cover the topic of Bibliographies I would be happy to hear them.
While talking with some people who are not members of our class about the subject of bibliographies, they attempted to help me. Only after receiving some direction from them on where I could go with my topic did I realize that Biographies and Bibliographies can be easily confused. Many people don’t tend to think much about bibliographies. They will glance at the end of the book or at the footnotes to see where the information for the information that we are reading is from and that is as far as most people actually get on the topic. However, bibliographies have a rich history, and do much more than just point us to where writers get their information.
When we look at some of the first bibliographies we do not know who the compilers of the bibliographies are. These bibliographers spent many hours reading and attempting to find many books on the same subject. They would then compile what they had found into a sort of list or index. The few of the first bibliographies that we do know the name of the person who wrote the compilation, we only know because they included their name on the list.
Bibliographies come in a few different forms. We have the normal biography, which is just a list that includes the name and author of the work along with a number of other details. We then have something which when combined into a list on the subject is extremely usefully, the annotated bibliography.
An annotated bibliography is a summary of what the main points of the book are about. They include many of the same things that a normal bibliography has, such as the title, the author’s name, and the year it was published. The most important thing about the annotated bibliography though is the fact that it summarizes the thoughts of another author and allows for another to quickly search for what the book is about.
Bibliographies have come from

1 comment:

  1. That sounded pretty good Montana! The only thing I would suggest is including some of your support in the intro paragraph and explicitly expounding on it in your body paragraphs.

    For example I didn't exactly understand the relevance of your 2nd paragraph to supporting your thesis, if there was some purpose for including that information you might want to make it clearer by tying it in to your overall thesis. (I might have just misunderstood it though)

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