About the Webography

First, don't forget it's due the first day of school. That it is two typed pages, single spaced (with a space between websites). Forgive me for saying this obvious stuff, but if I don't say it...I'll get some crazy looking papers.

Now, let me just repeat what I've explained to a few of you who have emailed me to ask, "How do I do this?"

I based this assignment on a common assignment I received in college called the annotated bibliography.

Let's say you were assigned a research paper, so you go to the library and do a bunch of research: you look at books, journals, websites...you stay all day and read, gathering information as you go along. Eventually, your direction in the research becomes clear, because as you must realize by now, you discover what your position is DURING the research, not before. You don't do research to confirm what you already believe! You do research to answer a question, and often at the beginning of the research, the question is not at all clear. But you blunder forward on faith, knowing something will gel for you if you give yourself to it.

You go home, and on the way home, energized by fresh air and distance, your position becomes clear. When you get home, you sit down to write down some notes...and you think, "Ah! I saw that today somewhere, but where? Where was it?"

Good luck remembering.

BUT. If you annotated your research...if you wrote a short paragraph after every MLA formatted entry, you would say, Oh, yeah. That was the site that had all those links. That book had a great index. That magazine had a list of resources for further study. It's the bedcrumbs you need to get home, Hansel and Gretel. The annotations simply tell you what was there, how useful it is, the bias of the author, what resources are available for further study.

So, an annotated webography ONLY DESCRIBES what is there at the website. You cannot possibly chase down every link and make the entries fit on two pages unless you do your work in 6-point type or something crazy like that, but you can say, "extensive list of links, including one on ritualized use of soma in religious worship."

Hope this helps.