Summative annotations (also known as "informative" annotations) provide only a summary of the author's main ideas. They are typically two to three sentences long and include no statements of the source’s relevance to your paper or critical remarks evaluating the source’s quality.
Summative annotations may include the following type of information:
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988. 251-62. An essay by the influential Nigerian author Achebe on the prevalent image of Africa in the Western imagination, focusing on the racist dimensions of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Achebe presents an interpretation of the function of images of Others in the construction of cultural identity and identifies a pervasive need on the part of "the West" to denigrate and dehumanize Africa.
Johnstone, Frederick A. Class, Race, and Gold: A Study of Class Relations and Racial Discrimination in South Africa. London: Routledge, 1976. Johnstone examines the labor experience of nonwhites in South African gold mines, arguing that the structure of the labor system comes from the industrial capitalism of the mines. Johnstone portrays the low-wage blacks as pawns of the bourgeois mine owners. Contains a bibliography and many tables and statistics on black wage-earners and mine owners.
Schale, K.W. "Ageist Language in Psychological Research." American Psychologist 48 (1993). 49-51. An article on avoiding ageist bias in research, including discussion on objective research design and on how to report what the research actually demonstrates without adding value-laden assumptions.
*These examples follow MLA format. For other documentation formats (e.g., Chicago and APA), please consult one of the links in the Examples of Annotations on the Web box or a writing consultant, a handbook, a citation guide or a librarian.
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