How to write a literature review part 1

How not to write a literature review:

Her research interests are post-secondary, higher education and adult learning experiences, particularly graduate research writing, academic literacies and qualitative research methodologies. In this 2-part guest post she explains her approach to teaching postgraduates about literature reviews.

Without a doubt, the literature review is one of the most challenging genres students face. It is also one of the most challenging genres to teach. How do you explain in an hour or two a process that takes years of practice, feedback and revision to hone and refine? Recently, I conducted research on literature reviews with the specific aim of helping me to teach this genre to postgraduate students Badenhorst, ; forthcoming.

Why are literature reviews so complex? Literature reviews demand a range of academic literacies from writers. What we want students to achieve is the shift from knowledge-telling to knowledge-transformation in their literature reviews.

Knowledge-telling might involve using an approach that includes copying directly from source texts, including too many citations, and representing texts with numerous and lengthy direct quotations. Often this approach is used as a way for novice writers to become familiar with the genre.

Knowledge-transformation, however, requires the student to do something with the source documents. However, as Cumming, et al. What basics do students need to know about literature reviews? First, students need to understand the basic genre.

Genres are accepted conventions of both content and form. Explicitly teaching what goes into a literature review can help students to assess their own writing and make active decisions on how much they want to conform to the genre or how much they want to deviate.

Table 1 provides an example of how the genre of literature reviews can be explicitly explained to students.In the literature review (or context/related work) section, I want to talk about: the various How to write the literature review part of a paper when 'the perfect one' has already been written?

It tackled the topics #1, 2 and 4 of the review I want to write. Question: How to write my review, since this papers does almost all the job in. How do you write a literature review? First decide what form the review will take - descriptive or a critical assessment - then look at the relationships between different views and draw out key themes.

A literature review should provide an overview of the main theories, methods and findings of scholarly papers in a given field or topic. A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis.

A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. Why do we write literature reviews? Literature. First decide what form the review will take - descriptive or a critical assessment - then look at the relationships between different views and draw out key themes.

A literature review should provide an overview of the main theories, methods and findings of scholarly papers in a given field or topic. Further Tips for Writing a Literature Review. Full-length literature reviews.

Many full-length literature review articles use a three-part structure: Introduction (where the topic is identified and any trends or major problems in the literature are introduced), Body (where the studies that comprise the literature on that topic are discussed), and Discussion or Conclusion (where major patterns.

A literature review describes academic papers which are relevant to a particular field or topic. It provides an overview of the main theories and hypotheses, appropriate methods and methodologies, what questions are being .