Authors Note

The research question I chose is very important to me because it combines both agricultural issues and environmental issues. Writing this was somewhat difficult for me because at first I couldn't find much information on sustainable agriculture in the way that I wanted, so I ended up searching for more general information and using the results I found to narrow down my research question. The only thing that was easy in this essay was getting the formatting correct. The steps I took were finding my original question and narrowing that down during the in class activity with AI, looking for sources through the NDSU library, changing my question when I couldn't find anything based on what information was available, and then writing the annotations. Overall, I feel like my annotated bibliography is pretty effective and accurate. I do have some doubts about some of the sources relating to their usefulness directly to my research question, but I feel like I have a very strong start for the synthesis. I feel my strength in writing so far is being able to sit down and just write stuff and being able to pick out the parts I need from my sources pretty quickly, unless the source is really interesting. I spent a lot of time for this essay writing the annotations and a lot less time compared to actually reading the sources, despite some of them being really long, which I believe some of my previous writing experience helped with. I think I could draw on this in the future by using good sources, regardless of how long the source is for my writing. The feedback that I was given by my peers and teacher was very positive and did not give me anything to add, remove, or change, so there was no feedback to implement.