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It’s a common misconception that researching and writing a literature review is a straightforward process that starts with research and ends with writing. The reality is that research and writing are intertwined, often with one process informing and reinforcing the other. This chapter of the micro-course provides some guidance in how to approach writing as a recursive and integrated process that most effectively (and efficiently!) occurs along with your research.
A helpful analogy for thinking about the interconnected activities of researching and writing is that of a band performing music. While individual musicians in a band will sometimes play louder, and some musicians may stop playing their instruments during a song, the musicians all remain on stage together, building on and responding to one another. Similarly, while you may conduct more research or more writing at different points during your literature review process, the two activities are very much interrelated, building on each other and responding to each other. To try to conduct your research and write completely separately would be like playing only one instrument in a band at a time–it wouldn’t sound very cohesive.
As you conduct your research, you will likely read many sources that model the same kind of literature review that you yourself are researching and writing. While your original intent in reading those sources is likely to learn from the studies’ content (e.g. their results and discussion), it will benefit you to re-read these articles rhetorically.
Reading rhetorically means paying attention to how a text is written—how it has been structured, how it presents its claims and analyses, how it employs transitional words and phrases to move from one idea to the next. You might also pay attention to an author’s stylistic choices, like the use of first-person pronouns, active and passive voice, or technical terminology.
Consider this notion: Reading sample literature reviews rhetorically constitutes a form of writing. It does! When you read to write you are likely composing thoughts and experimenting with organization in your head. That cognitive activity is crucial to building familiarity with the nebulous literature review genre, and it also helps to build an effective and efficient writing process that works for you.
Writing can (and should!) be folded into your research process. It’s not only a strategy for getting the writing process started earlier, but a means of deepening your thinking about your project.
You might, for instance, incorporate informal writing activities into your data collection and management by writing short summaries or critiques of sources as you read them (you may know this strategy as creating an “annotated bibliography”). Alternatively, you might fill out pre-made templates for your sources to ensure you record all the most important information (e.g. experimental methods used, populations studied), or you might annotate your sources directly by hand or electronically.
Click on the following headings to learn more about each of these informal writing strategies.
Once you have done enough research that you feel you’re in a good position to begin drafting in earnest, it will be important to consider what the overall structure of your literature review will look like. As you know from previous lessons, the type and form of your review will dictate to a large degree the structure of your final product.
It will be important for you to find example literature reviews of the same type and form that you are writing so that you can get a sense of the specific expectations of that kind of review. If possible, you might look at specific examples that also target the same audience and pursue the same purposes as your own literature review. For example, you might find sample dissertation chapters written by peers with the same adviser as you; or you might find reviews published in the same journal that you’re submitting to.
With a clear sense of what the final product should look like, you might begin drafting your literature review in a number of ways. Some writers like to begin by outlining the different sections of the review, either in broad strokes or in specific detail. Other writers like to begin with a mind map of all their collected sources to help them envision relationships among them. Yet other writers like to begin with freewriting, which allows them to get ideas onto the page and deal with organization later.
Click on the following headings to learn more about each of these drafting strategies.
Depending on the kind of literature review you’re writing, the overarching structure can look quite different. For the purposes of this introductory micro-course though, let’s walk through a fairly common structure for narrative reviews—that is, reviews that typically feature a clear introduction, body, and conclusion.
Each of these three sections has a specific rhetorical purpose. In other words, they are meant to do certain things:
While you’re drafting, try to keep in mind the purpose of each section, and plan on spending a significant amount of time revising your document to ensure that each of these purposes is met.
As you might imagine, drafting and revising the body can be particularly labor-intensive! Consider breaking this component of your drafting into smaller, less intimidating tasks. For example:
Above all, allow yourself to engage in drafting as an ongoing (and often messy!) process. There is no one “correct” way to draft a literature review, and you may find that using different strategies at different stages will help you make progress toward the final product you’re aiming for.
Remember, writing is a cognitive process, so allow yourself to use the drafting process as a means of deepening and organizing your own thinking about your research. Revision, on the other hand, presents an opportunity to transform your writing from a thinking tool to a communication tool. In other words, revising is a process for considering how your target audience will experience your writing through its relative clarity and cohesion.
Just like drafting, there are multiple revising strategies you might explore, but generally speaking revision is most effective when it moves intentionally from global concerns to local concerns. Global concerns are whole-text issues that impact a reader’s overall experience of your piece. For example: Does it have a clear focus? Is it effectively organized? Local concerns are paragraph- or sentence-specific issues that impact a reader’s experience in particular areas. For example: Are there clear transitions? Could word choice be more precise? Are there proofreading errors?
Once you’ve addressed the major global concerns in your draft and considered how your readers might experience navigating the document, you might take a final pass through your language—sentence by sentence—to fine-tune your style.
Click on the following headings to learn more about each revision strategy.
Finally, don’t forget that talking about your writing with knowledgeable, engaged readers is an effective way to gain new perspectives, learn new strategies, and make progress toward your goals. Lesson 4 provides a list of resources (including outside readers like Writing Center instructors!) to support you in your research and writing.