Ian Olmedo

English 1302-208

Dr. Kevin Lindberg

15 Feb. 2024

Annotated Bibliography Reflection

Working on this assignment, I thought it would be so easy, all I had to do was grab a

source about my topic and write about it. This assignment was more thorough than that; in

addition to needing more information, I looked for articles that compared going to school or

working in a field of business and learning the ropes alongside having a mentor. Finding credible

sources that wanted to explain and share knowledge instead of trying to sell you on their business

course was a little tricky. Something else I learned was how to write the actual annotations; this

meant going more into depth on the article and finding out how it would help my writing in the

future. The information I learned and wrote down now would help me in the future to narrow

down where I can source information and know what way I connected to the article.

I learned a couple of new strategies during this assignment; such ass, Snopes, and the

Tamiu Library. I used Snopes to find if the source was credible, not just a new AI-generated

account with information. In other words, I used Snopes to find if the author had created or

worked on other articles in the past. I also utilized the Tamiu Library during this annotated

Bibliography. I know it sounds crazy, but I felt like I forgot to use the library’s search engine

from last year so I decided I could include this. The Library did not have an abundance of

information or articles about my topic so I was only able to pull one source from it. With this

source I searched the author and found another article that led to my best-supporting article. “The

Effects of Mentoring in Entrepreneurial Career Choice” by Chuck Eesley and Yanbo Wang.
 This assignment taught me how to laterally search for information and an author. I

followed the steps as follows; open tabs on my topic, find an article, search about the author,

check their work, read the original article, and lastly site them if they had reliable information.

This is not only beneficial for researching a topic, but a strategy I learned about that can help me

fact-check sources and who created that article. Connecting articles that support one singular

author’s writing allows me to know that this person is a credible writer.

Being able to use the visual text in an artifact that I am analysing is critical. While my

articles did not have many pictures of research or test, the articles included photos of the author.

These photos allowed for me to put a person behind this writing and visualize them explaining

and talking about their findings to me. These little references allowed me to feel more connected

to the author; additional to connections, I feld that I was able to pull apart information that was

meaningful and supportive of my writing.

From the feedback I got from my professor on my annotated bibliography, I was able to

define what I did right and wrong. My strength in writing an annotated bibliography would be

my ability to dissect the information in an article and manipulate it to argue my perspective on a

topic. Finding how I can utilize the article in my writing seems to be of most importance. My

weaknesses in my writing come from grammatical errors and not being able to cite my sources

properly. For the most part, I can fix my source generations by revisiting our class textbook and

comparing my cited sources with the examples. My grammatical errors came from me not

reading my paper at different times of the day and more than twice. I should have taken a closer

look at my paper after not focusing on writing, this would have allowed me to easily spot these

errors and fix them. I would do this strategy of leaving my paper alone overnight and taking a
look at it the next day to find errors last semester, I just did not take the time to do so for this

assignment. I definitely will revisit my strategy for my next writing assignment.

The comments left on my writing will change. I will strive for the comments to be more

on what I wrote than how I wrote. I will concentrate more on cleaning my writing and preparing

my sources properly. Reading how grammar is not a stealth or a weakness I will definitely make

sure any citations are up to standard and correct.

The most challenging part of this assignment had to of been finding my sources. I looked

and scoured for a couple of hours and I would constantly get articles of a business owner

speaking about his/her journey and how you can learn more if you subscribed to their blog. I

dismissed these sources because they were created to sell a course. I also did background digging

on each author as to what they have done in business and writing. This added to the time that I

took finding my sources, but I definitely think it paid off.

Throughout this writing I think my identity as a writer has grown to be more careful and

definitely more diligent when picking an online source. I was able to find 3:1 fake or weak

sources to every source I used. I will definitely be more active when reading and analyzing

articles that I would wish to use in my writing.