Your synthesis essay, or literature review, should be 2000-2500 words, not including your Works Cited pages at the end of the review. In other words, the text of the paper should be 2000-2500 words. In addition your synthesis essay should include at least 10 scholarly sources in the references section. As stated above, this means that you may decide not to use all 12 sources that you summarized in your annotated bibliography. You are free to use all 12 of them. However, it is possible that your experience in writing summaries of the 12 sources led you to conclude that a few of them will not be as helpful to your topic as you had originally thought. You may decide not to include such sources in the synthesis essay. This is totally up to you. Moreover, you might find other sources that you would like to include in your synthesis essay that were not included in your annotated bibliography.
