Assignments

Source Analysis

This assignment provides practice in the skills of tracking down sources, catching the drift of their contents, and assessing their usefulness for your scholarly projects. Here are the steps of the assignment. You will enter information from each step in your Classwork Document:

1. Pick one item cited in the class readings by Showalter or Greenblatt.
2. Create a bibliography entry for your chosen source in Chicago NB style. To format your entry, you can use my quick guide (PDF) or, for more detail, the Purdue Online Writing Lab's page on Chicago style. If you use a tool that generates bibliography entries automatically, that's fine as a starting point, but they often get details wrong. Do the final version of your entry yourself, carefully.
3. Search for the title and author using the search box on the front of the Grinnell Libraries' web page. Is your source available in our library? Online? If online, how?
4. Using the same search interface on the libraries' website, change the search scope to "Books, articles & media everywhere." Do additional ways of accessing your source now appear?
5. Try searching for your source through Google Books and, separately, Google Scholar. In this step, the most interesting results will probably arise from other sources that refer to your source. What do you discover by using the Google resources? What advantages or disadvantages do they have relative to the library interface?
6. Write a couple of sentences describing what the source is about. If you have access to the source, you may be able to skim it. Otherwise, you may find help from book reviews or online descriptions. At the end of your description, write how you got your information.
7. Write the title of one other thing the author of your source has written.
8. In one or two sentences, make the best case you can for how your source could be useful for a student writing a paper for English 121.

Adapted from an assignment written by Carolyn Jacobson