I general idea

An annotation is a concise description of a particular work, including important aspects of content not evident in the title. It enables the researcher to establish the relevance of a specific work and to decide whether to read the full text of the work.

Assignments often call for an annotated bibliography. When required to write an annotation for each source used, the annotation should:

• explain why the source is relevant to your research; and

• critically examine the source.

An annotation is a brief summary of a book, article, or other publication. An abstract is also a summary, but there is a difference between the two. An abstract is simply a summary of a work, whereas the purpose of an annotation is to describe the work in such a way that the reader can decide whether or not to read the work itself. An annotated bibliography helps the reader understand the particular usefulness of each item. The ideal annotated bibliography shows the relationships among individual items and may compare their strengths or shortcomings.

There are three distinct types of annotations:

a DESCRIPTIVE annotation merely identifies the areas to be covered in the report. It is an extended statement of purpose or scope. Such an annotation is only useful for a very long report, because it demonstrates only the paper's organization, not its content.

an INFORMATIVE annotation summarizes the entire report and gives the reader an overview of the facts that will be laid out in detail in the paper itself. It is rarely longer than one page and should never exceed more than 10% of the length of the entire report; otherwise it defeats its own purpose.

a CRITICAL annotation in addition to describing the contents, evaluates the usefulness of a book or article for particular situations. An annotation has certain features that set it aside from other pieces of academic writing.

• it is always short;

• it is written for the same audience as the article/report, so it uses the same level of technical language;

• it always summarizes the major points of the results;

• it summarizes the major points of the materials and methods, and of the discussion;

in most disciplines, it never includes bibliographic citations.

Comprehension questions:

1. For what purposes is annotation written?

2. What is the difference between the abstract and annotation?

3. What are the two types of annotations?

TASK 1 In pairs decide which of the annotations are descriptive, critical or informative. Give reasons.

1

Computerized speech recognition takes advantage of the most natural form of communication, the human voice. During speech, sound is generated by the vocal cords and by air rushing from the lungs. If the vocal cords vibrate, a voiced sound is produced; otherwise, the sound is unvoiced. The main problem in speech recognition is that no two voices produce their sounds alike and that an individual voice varies in different conditions. Because voices do vary and because words blend together in a continuous stream in natural speech, most recognition systems require that each speaker train the machine to his or her voice and that words have at least one-tenth of a second pause between them. Such a system is called an isolated word recognition system and consists of three major components that process human speech: (1) the preprocessor which removes irregularities from the speech signal and then breaks it up into parts; (2) the feature extractor which extracts 32 key features from the signal; and (3) the classification phase which identifies the spoken word and includes the training mode and reference pattern memory. Spoken words are identified on the basis of a certain decision algorithm, some of which involve dynamic programming, zero crossing rate, linear predictive coding, and the use of state diagram.

2

Voice recognition systems offer many applications including data entry, freedom for mobility, security uses, telephone access, and helpful devices for the handicapped. However, these same systems also face problems such as poor recognition accuracy, loss of privacy among those who use them, and limited vocabulary sizes. The goal of the industry is the development of speaker-independent systems that can recognize continuous human speech regardless of the speaker and that can continually improve their vocabulary size and recognition accuracy.

3

Herbert London, a Dean at New York University and author of several books and articles, explains how television contradicts five ideas commonly believed by most people, using specific examples seen on television, such as the assassination of John Kennedy, to demonstrate his points. His examples contradict such truisms as "seeing is believing", "a picture is worth a thousand words", and "satisfaction is its own reward." London uses logical arguments to support his ideas, and doesn't refer to any previous works on the topic: the article is his personal opinion. His style and vocabulary would make the article of interest to any reader. The article clearly illustrates London's points, but does not explore their implications, leaving the reader with many unanswered questions.

4

The author explains how television contradicts five ideas commonly believed by most people, using specific examples seen on television, such as the assassination of John Kennedy, to demonstrate his points. His examples contradict such truisms as "seeing is believing", "a picture is worth a thousand words", and "satisfaction is its own reward." London uses logical arguments to support his ideas, and doesn't refer to any previous works on the topic: the article is his personal opinion.