Connections A Hypertext Resource for Literature

Bibliography Exercise

This assignment helps you develop your skills of quotation and citation on their own, before you are also tackling the other complexities of writing a paper. The assignment is due by 7:00 p.m. Iowa time on Friday.

For this exercise, as you will for the final paper, you will use Chicago style, in the Notes and Bibliography (NB) mode. The Purdue Online Writing Lab's page about Chicago style offers a sample paper and instructions on citing many kinds of sources. If you have any questions about whether or how to cite a source, please ask me.

Your submission for this exercise will include three parts:

  1. A title. Begin your assignment with a title. It can be as serious or as silly as you like, but do use the conventional formatting for academic papers: place your title above the main text, centered. On its own, your title does not require any additional formatting such as quotation marks or italics. Use that formatting only for material that already requires it, such as other authors' titles or quoted language, as in

    "(whoa, whoa, whoa)":
    The Parenthetical Magic of Taylor Swift's "End Game"

    Here, the quotation marks occur only when necessary to indicate that "(Whoa, whoa, whoa)" comes from Smith's text and then to show that "End Game" is the title of her song.

  2. A miniature essay. Write two or three paragraphs that give you opportunities to quote a set of sources related to something we have read in class so far. If you have some idea of what you might write about for your final paper, this can be an opportunity to try out some of your early ideas. Otherwise, you can focus on this week's readings or something else. I will emphasize, however, that this is not meant to be an intensive research process; for the purposes of the assignment, you need simply to find some sources that you can quote.

    Your mini-essay should quote at least three sources, including at least one full-length book and one academic article. Drawing on sources from our syllabus is fine, and, of course, you can find others through the College libraries. Each quotation should cite its source in a Chicago-style footnote.

  3. A bibliography. Again following Chicago style (NB version), the bibliography should have, at the top, the word Bibliography centered on a line of its own. (For this and other points, the Purdue site's sample paper provides excellent guidance.) That is followed by the bibliography itself, with all the sources quoted in your miniature essay.