The impending Bibliopocalypse

A dozen times this morning I wanted to stop and take a photo--of colorful leaves reflected in the river, pink stripes in the sky highlighting red and orange trees, light filtering through leaves so golden they seem to glow from within. I keep telling myself I have enough photos of fall leaves but I'd better enjoy them while I can because soon I'll be immersed in a task that will keep me tied to my computer screen for hours on end.

I refer, of course, to the Bibliopocalypse. I have gone on record confessing that I hate annotated bibliographies. They're a pain to teach and a pain to grade and they inspire a host of complaints among students. So much can go wrong: not enough sources, the wrong kinds of sources, inadequate summaries, absent evaluations, every type of format error known to the MLA handbook, and I have to keep an eye open for every possible problem. First I count the listings and determine whether they're in alphabetical order, and then I go through them with a fine-toothed comb, marking problems and offering suggestions. Then there's the rubric, the grade, the comments--a total slog, but if I assign such an onerous task, my feedback had better reflect some serious effort.

If everyone hates annotated bibliographies, why not just ditch the assignment? Because gathering, summarizing, evaluating, and citing an array of sources is a valuable stage in a large research project. In first-year composition courses I might require students to turn in individual source evaluations over the course of a week or two, but for the English majors in my capstone class, they've already submitted a research proposal so now they have to show that they've put in the legwork to locate appropriate sources. If they do a thorough job summarizing and evaluating those sources, they'll be way ahead of the game when they write their drafts next week. And then we'll be off to the races with presentations, revisions, and final papers. There's no turning back now--the rest of the semester is just one big assignment after another.

So I have only 24 hours before the Bibliopocalypse, and I intend to enjoy them. Look at those leaves! But the time I have a minute to spare to look outside again, they'll all be on the ground.