As Dr. Wahhaj explains in the assignment instructions, you will "choose one work, one author, or a themed subject to explore in greater depth from a list of works in any of the three volumes . . . ." Once you have chosen a topic, it's time to develop keywords that you can use as search terms.
If you're choosing an author, then the search terms are fairly straightforward: the author's name. Let's say, for example, that you're researching the author Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Then your first search in the library databases should be:
Instead, let's consider writing about a work. Perhaps you've chosen Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In that case, your search terms could be:
Or perhaps, after reading Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," you'd like to explore the theme of the gothic in British literature. In that case, consider appropriate keywords, such as:
Now that you have keywords, it's time to search the databases. Have you used the databases before? If you don't have recent experience with our library's databases, then I suggest watching this introductory video.
The video embedded above shows you how to search Academic Search Complete, which is a database of magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals on a wide variety of subjects. It includes many articles of literary criticism, which is your current field of research. Search it with your keywords. Make sure to limit your search results to scholarly journal articles for this assignment. There is no need, however, to put a date limit in your search.
Another literature-focused database to search is Literature Resource Center. The above video shows you how to search it.
JSTOR is a database of scholarly journals in the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. It contains many works of literary criticism. The above video shows you how to search it.
Plagiarism is using someone else's work and giving the impression that it is yours. This video describes plagiarism in detail and how you can avoid it.
In addition to watching this video, you should look at this brochure about academic integrity from the college. It describes plagiarism and other forms of cheating as defined by the Lone Star College System.
You must cite your sources according to the MLA style of documentation.
This is our video that introduces MLA documentation. I urge you to watch the entire video carefully before starting to write your paper or annotated bibliography. It is much easier to cite correctly as you go along, rather than try to fix your documentation after you have written your paper.
This is our sample paper. When you're writing a paper, you can model the formatting of your paper after this one. If you are unsure how to set up the formatting in Microsoft Word so that it fits the requirements for MLA formatting, you could instead download this blank Word document that has the formatting already set up for you.
This is our 2-page handout that summarizes the MLA style. It includes most of the types of sources that students commonly use.
