Depending on your project or the assignment, you may be asked to write using one or all of the techniques below:

• Summarize:  What are the main arguments? What is the point of this book or article? What topics are covered? If someone asked what this article/book is about, what would you say?
• Assess: Is it a useful source? How does it compare with other sources in your bibliography? Is the information reliable? Is this source biased or objective? What is the goal of this source?
• Reflect: Was this source helpful to you? How does it help you shape your argument? How can you use this source in your research project? Has it changed how you think about your topic?

• Proper Citations: Each of your sources must be cited properly according to the required style guide. Most often, English and other Liberal Arts courses make use of MLA while the Sciences such as psychology and nursing use APA. Either way, sources ought to appear in alphabetical order with a hanging indentation (see the APA example below for an example of hanging indentation). You can reference the library's MLA and APA citation guides or visit other online writing centers such as Purdue OWL.
• Strong Summaries: Each annotation should clearly state the topic, main arguments, and any particularly important examples in the source. The length of summaries will vary according to the length of the source but generally speaking a summary should not be shorter than three sentences.
• Helpful Evaluation: The second part of an annotation is the evaluation of the source. When writing this evaluation, think about your own project and consider how this source helps you in completing it. Is the source a good introduction to the current debate surrounding your topic? Does it provide particularly strong or unique arguments? Is it written by one of the leading voices in the subject? Remember that just because a source may disagree with your thesis, that does not make it a bad source. In fact, it may be the perfect thing to include for a counterargument. Any and all of these observations can be included in the evaluation. Generally the evaluation is one to two sentences long.