Critical Reflective Essay II

To compose my annotated bibliography I started out by coming up with a Boolean phrase, I used the Children AND Horror, Haunted AND Children, and Horror movies AND Children. I made sure to use children in my Boolean phrases because I wanted to make sure the article was about children. I used the search engines Academic Search Complete, and MLA bibliography. I determined that these articles were scholarly by making sure they had a reliable bibliography, also many of the articles I used had a little section about the author that made the author credible. For the articles I took notes on a sheet of paper and took basic notes or drew a mind map. I found that drawing the mind maps helped me because it made me focus on what was the most important in only a few words which helped me to understand the authors main points. In doing this scholarly research it was not much different than other research I had done before. Last semester I also had to write a scholarly research paper and in high school I had to write a 10-page research paper. During my research for this paper I did further my search engines, I had used Academic Search Complete before but due to my research project not being as well known I had to evaluate other search engines and I found that MLA bibliography was by far the best search engine for me to use for my research. The problems that occurred while I was doing my annotated bibliography was that articles pertaining to my research questions were hard to find, I had to really search in order to find them, which was time consuming, but very worth it in the end. After completing some research my research question has not changed, doing the research actually helped me in deciding that my research question was exactly what it should be. Although doing this research did change my mind about the movies that I am going to watch and analyze. Many different articles analyzed different horror movies and they all fit very well with my topic that it is going to be hard to narrow it down to the 2 or 3 that will work the best. During my research I have arrived at a more complex understanding of my research question. I now understand more of what I am researching and know much more about my project than what I did starting it. I do not have any new questions and I have now narrowed down what I was going to research for my project more, which will help me to go further in depth about my research question. I composed my annotated bibliography by starting with my thesis and then I put my works cited. Under my works cited I then quickly paraphrased the article and then made a new paragraph analyzing it and telling why the article will help support my essay. I do think my annotated bibliography could be a good resource to other people. I cannot think of anything in my annotated bibliography that I would revise, the only thing that I can think of is that it may be to short. I tried to keep my summarizing short so people could easily read about the article to determine if they would use it and I am hoping that was a good decision. For example my shortest paragraph is 3 sentences, which may seem short but it does contain all of the information that I found useful in my reading.