**5. Limitations of the study**

There are two limitations that should be noted about this study. The researcher did not read any of the source materials. Thus the annotations were examined without direct reference to the documents on which they were based. While this may be regarded as a disadvantage in one sense, it was felt that annotations can stand on their own, capable of communicating the information required by those accessing them. This researcher did not consider it necessary to refer to the sources in order to assess the annotations themselves.

In the instructions provided in the study guide, students' attention was drawn to the three broad tasks that the Purdue OWL website highlighted for developing the annotation, namely summarize, evaluate and reflect. The analysis done for this study focused on the summarizing aspect only for two reasons. First, in most annotations, there was no evidence of the other two dimensions. In the few instances where there was an attempt at the evaluative, these were largely not in keeping with the core requirements of such a task. This will be explored in more detail later. Given this situation, the researcher decided to concentrate on the summarizing aspect of the annotation. While this may be regarded as a limitation, it was also felt that doing the summary was a substantial multifaceted undertaking and that much can be gained by examining it in its own right.
