Annotated Bibliography Essentials: Application Writing

In the Writing Center, when we talk about synthesis we often ask the “So What?” question—you’ve provided evidence and analysis related to your topic, but so what? What does it mean? If you haven’t answered this question in you text, you likely need to add an explanation of why this information matters so that your readers can follow your argument.

In the Application portion of an annotation, you similarly answer the “So What?” question. You tie the key information you gained from this article (provided in your Summary) and your understanding of that information (provided in your Analysis) to your own project. You situate that article in the context of your research and give the reader a sense of why it matters. It’s a bit like the Lead-out portion of the MEAL plan: as in a lead-out, your Application connects your evidence and analysis to an overall argument.

Let’s walk through how you might construct an Application portion of an annotation. Typically, the Application is about a paragraph in length. You could use whichever approach you prefer to structure this paragraph, such as the MEAL plan, PEAS, NO TEARS, or various other methods of constructing paragraphs not based on acronyms. (I’ll use the MEAL plan here for the sake of simplicity and consistency with our other paragraphing resources.) Your Application might look a little bit different than a typical MEAL paragraph because it needs to focus primarily on synthesis, but it should still contain the key MEAL components. You’ll need:

A main idea (M), which is usually your main takeaway from this article.

Some evidence (E). You’ve already provided evidence in your Summary, so you usually won’t need to restate it here. Instead, you might briefly reference one or two key ideas from your Summary to illustrate your main idea.

Some analysis (A) to convey your understanding of that key evidence.

A lead-out (L) to establish the article’s connection to your research project.

Let’s look at an example Application paragraph (taken from our Annotations webinar):

This study was valuable to my understanding of how a female police officer’s experiences may be different than a male police officer’s. While Thompson et al.’s conclusions are not generalizable, their literature review is helpful to any scholar first approaching the subject. However, the researchers also showed that more studies should be conducted to fully explore the possible differences in police experiences that they identified.

Notice that there are only three sentences here, which is okay—remember, the MEAL plan is a guide, not a formula. The important thing is that the Application paragraph provides each MEAL component.

While you’re in the process of writing an annotated bibliography, it can seem tedious to write an Application for each annotation. The answer to the “so what?” question might seem obvious or, alternatively, unimportant to you in that moment. However, doing the work of writing an Application for each of your annotations provides a basis for the next phase of your research. By articulating  your sources’ usefulness, you lay the groundwork necessary for synthesizing those sources later on (this is, in part, why you’re often asked to write annotations in preparation for a literature review), because writing an Application, as with all writing, clarifies your own thinking about your topic.

If you're curious to learn more, click here to view all of the posts in this five-part series on Annotated Bibliography Essentials!

Matt Sharkey-Smith is a senior writing instructor in the Walden Writing Center. He also serves as contributing faculty in the Walden Academic Skills Center.  Matt joined the Writing Center in 2010 with a BA in English from Saint John's University in Minnesota. He earned an MFA in Writing from Hamline University in St. Paul in 2011 and has worked outside of Walden as a technical writer, fact-checker, copy editor, tutor, and writing instructor.

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