8 The Common Sense PDF Annotation Project
Overview
For several years, students in Introduction to Literary Research have created on-line scholarly editions of texts that they have carefully researched. Explanatory essays and annotations provide historical detail, define word or phrase usage, comment on literary techniques, explicate poetic form, themes, and more. For this project, most students are asked to simply annotate passages from Common Sense – see Passage Editors below – others will write background essays. In the past, students have completed hypertext annotation projects. For a complete list of projects, look here.
This semester we will be using Adobe Reader to annotate our text. Adobe Reader is available in all college labs and is free for download to your personal machine (follow this link for the free download).
Pages of Common Sense adapted from the on-line Gutenberg text, is your starting point. Passage editors will each carefully read, research, and annotate two pages of the text. Finally, the entire edition will be placed on-line.
Specifics
Passage Editors–the reproduced copy of the text is divided into single pages. Find it here.
Most students will be responsible for carefully reading, researching, and annotating two pages of the text using the Adobe Reader comment feature. Annotate difficult words; provide brief historical or biographical introductions to events, people, and concepts (when possible and appropriate); explain the intricacies of your passage. Number of annotations will vary, but shoot for a minimum of 10 annotations per section. Some will be quite brief; others will be more extensive. If you cannot come up with issues or words to annotate, please discuss the section with me; I will gladly make suggestions. Proofread carefully and save your comments with your pdf. I will be demonstrating this in class. By the due date, e-mail your pages with comments to me.
Background Research–A limited number students will conduct research and write side essays on topics that provide context for the main text. Well-researched and well-written discussions, approximately 2 pages long (works cited information included), will be sent as Word attachments to me by the due date. Topics are found below:
- Tom Paine’s Life Before America
- The Printing of Common Sense / Its Reception
- Tom Paine’s Later Writings: The Controversy
- Tom Paine’s Life After the American Revolution
NOTE ON Works Cited
It is very likely that you will be using parenthetical citations for your annotations. Save a work cited list of the resources you use and, at the end of the project, send that list to me with your attached pdfs.
Due Friday October 30th (by class time)
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