Research assignment

I've been reading A Room of One's Own by Virginia Wolf, and it has made me consider a different kind of writing assignment for English 102. Wolf starts out with the subject of "women and fiction" and develops a thesis arguing that women require money and privacy in order to write/create. In her discussion of her research and what led her to this conclusion, she describes in great detail the discovery process. She speaks about her play-by-play reactions to what men have written about women (since the subject of women seems to have been a favorite of men at this time). She talks of the anger she felt when reading one gentleman's discussion of the mental, physical, and emotional inferiority of women. She describes her experience sitting, watching a male colleague take meticulous notes on some scientific enterprise, while she has trouble reading her own scattered notes. And she describes the visual she conjures of this nasty, prejudiced, misogynistic professor who writes about the subject of women.

I haven't had much luck with annotated bibliographies in my research classes. Many times, it's difficult for students to grasp the concept of summary/paraphrase and doing the work necessary to write a cohesive annotated bib. Maybe, instead of entry-by-entry annotations, I could have students write a narrative of their research. They could describe, like Wolf, the ups and downs of their research and their frustration and anger towards their subject, the authors they are researching, or even me as the professor assigning this project. As long as it was anchored in research and it showed how they thought through the problem to arrive at a research question and then a thesis. Anyway, something to think about...