But Does My Literature Review Sound Clever Enough?

✍This is a common worry, and a particularly pernicious one. You’ve just got absorbed into your work, you’re feeling motivated, you’ve started noticing interesting connections between sources, and then 💥BAM!💥 Am I doing it right? All the papers I read sound so clever! I don’t sound like that! How can I ever establish myself as an expert with this mess?! Fear and doubt rear their ugly heads and then paralysis sets in. You’d set aside the whole morning to get some real work done, but now? Impossible. Your pen falters on the page and it feels like there's a weight crushing down on you.

🤫 I’m going to let you in on a secret. 

All those papers you are reading 📚 -- the ones that sound so clever, the ones by the biggest and most established names in your field -- they all began as sloppy, messy drafts, every single one of them. And that is because drafts are supposed to be sloppy and messy. That’s their job. 

➡️ No one’s draft sounds clever. 

That’s all very well for a draft, you might say, but the final product has to sound clever. How do I get from here to there? A good point. And here is my counter-intuitive answer:

✳️ Sounding clever is one of those things that emerges while you are doing other things, an insight inspired by John Kay's Obliquity (Profile Books). 

➡️ So stop trying to sound clever and do those other things. Here are some ideas to get you started. 

🟣 Be curious. That paper you are reading now – does it use a statistical test you don’t know? That’s interesting. Take 15 minutes to look it up. Or maybe there’s a theoretical approach that seems particularly popular in your field. Why is everyone jumping on that bandwagon? That would be interesting to know. 

🟣 Be visual. Free yourself from the tyranny of the screen and experiment with some storyboarding techniques. Most literature reviews start with ‘There are many studies on X’ and end with ‘And therefore we need to ask Y’. ‘Y’, of course, is your research question. Write these two sentences out on cards. Put the first one at the top of your work space, and the last one at the bottom. Now take all the findings from previous studies you've read. Convert those into cards and start sorting. What patterns do you find? Map out the journey, step by logical step, between your start and end points.

🟣 Ask genuine questions. Start with that first paper in your to-read stack. Work out what it’s arguing and what its main findings are, and then read the rest of your allotted papers for the day in who-dunnit mode, recording the answers as you go. Who agrees with the first paper? Who disagrees? Which findings point in the same direction? Which do not? Who goes off in a different direction entirely? Who do you think makes the strongest arguments, and the weakest? Having assessed the evidence, what in your view does the weight of evidence suggest?

🟣 Remember your true purpose. The point of your literature is not to sound clever. The point of your literature review is to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. Concentrate on making the case. 

🟣 Remember that the very act of reading is strengthening your style. There is a curious connection between reading and writing: the more you read in the style in which you want to write, the better you will get at it, naturally and without trying. 

💡I’ll leave you with one last insight. It’s not really about sounding clever. It’s about knowing your stuff. Work out your argument. My research question needs to be asked because . . . Work out the answer to that, the main points that support that answer, and the evidence for each point. Once you've done that, sounding clever takes care of itself.

Can I Use Blog Posts in My Literature Review?

 Ah – now that’s an interesting question 🤔. 

Usually, the answer is something like this: 

‼️ NO, absolutely NOT, blog posts can be written by anyone on anything and are NOT reliable sources. They are NOT the research literature. DON’T go there‼️

Generally, this is good advice. Blog posts can indeed be written by anyone on anything, they do not generally go through any rigorous process of quality control before they are published, and they may or may not be reliable. As the author of a post, you sit down, write your piece, do such revision and editing as you think necessary, press publish, and there you go – your post is up. Your views, opinions, thoughts, and insights are in the world. 

These may be all well and good, but they are not research findings. 

To access these, you need to go where those findings are – to articles in academic journals, essays in edited collections, and scholarly books. These have gone through peer review before publication: experts in the field have critiqued the work and it then appears in print because it has been deemed a contribution to knowledge: it asks a worthy question, has devised sound methods for answering, has collected relevant and sufficient data towards that answer, and has put forward an analysis that stands up to scrutiny. 

But does that mean that blog posts are permanently off-limits and have no place to play in a literature review? 

In this post (yes, I know – a blog post about using blog posts 😂), I am going to suggest -- 😱 Shock! Horror! 😱 -- that there may be circumstances where blogs, and similar things like sharing platform comments, can be useful in a literature review. We live in a world where the public domain has expanded to include both print and online material, and it can be useful to look at both. 

For anyone still gasping at this outrageous idea, you may be somewhat relieved by my hefty caveat: 

⚠️ Remember that blogs are blogs, not research articles, and so they must be treated as blogs. They can provide a slice of the public conversation on your topic if the popular view is useful to assess in your literature review, but they do not replace the research literature in your field. If you find yourself only reading and citing blogs, you haven’t really started yet. The bulk of your literature review should deal with the peer-reviewed published research in your field.

So, after you have dealt thoroughly with the research literature on your topic, when might it make sense to look at things like blogs and sharing platform comments? 

🟣 I drew on fan site comments in my analysis of Sheila Quigley’s regional crime fiction novel Bad Moon Rising. In that piece, it was useful to know not only what the research literature said about regional fiction, but also what reviewers and fans were saying about Bad Moon Rising in particular. For reviewers, I went to the news media. To find out what fans were saying, the place to go was fan sites, so that is where I went. I cited those comments specifically as fan comments, not research findings, and it was in addition to the research literature, not in place of it. 

🟣 I also drew on sharing platform comments in a systematised review of the way educational research deals with pop cultural depictions of teachers and teaching. In the world of systematic reviewing, there is a method called translation, which directs you to relate each finding from each study in your data set to all the others. In so doing, the idea is to come up with a conclusion about what they ultimately add up to. Translation, as I discovered when I consulted the peer-reviewed methodological literature on it, is notoriously mysterious. Each definition I read compounded the confusion. After establishing this in an analysis of the literature, I noted that the clearest definition turned up in a sharing platform comment. 

🟣 As a final example, let’s consider how academic blogging might be useful in a literature review. Increasingly, academics are encouraged to blog about their research, so we now have the published peer-reviewed research, blogs about the published peer-reviewed research, and any comments that might accumulate about that. After – and that is important – after you have tracked down and read the original peer-reviewed published research, an assessment of all those voices in relation to your take on the research might be useful. What did the original research actually say? What views on that research emerge in the research literature? How is the research presented on the blog? What views about it emerge in the public comments on the blog? Are those voices convergent or divergent? Is the idea circulating about what the original research said different from what it actually said? That might be an important question for your literature review. 

So there you have it. Blogs and such like can sometimes be useful in your literature review -- 

⚠️ If you have already tackled the body of peer-reviewed research in your field;

⚠️ If you treat them as the subjective opinion pieces they are; and

⚠️ If you deal with them critically. 

If anyone is interested in the publications I've mentioned, here are the references:

Mandala, S. 2012. 'Crime Fiction as Regional Fiction: An Analysis of Dialect and Point of View in Sheila Quigley's Bad Moon Rising'. Style 46 (2): 177-200. 

Mandala, S. 2023. 'Stylistics, Pop Culture, and Educational Research: A Systematized Review and Case Study'. English Text Construction 16 (2): 144-168.

 

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater professional success through more effective writing, thinking, and use of language. 

She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

 🟢 Visit her website: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

 🟢 Connect with her on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

What Kind of Writer Are You?

✍ In this blog, I typically focus on writing dissertation literature reviews. In today’s blog, however, I want to shift gears ⚙️ a bit and focus on you -- the dissertation literature review writer. 

What kind of writer are you? 

Whoa there, you might be thinking. Writers have ‘kinds’? 

Yes, it’s true – we don’t all write the same way. 🫨

🟣 Some people, as Sky Marsen outlines in her excellent book Professional Writing*, are bottom-up writers. We start by generating ideas, collecting information, and gathering data. This results in a massive pile of stuff 📚, which we then sift, sort, evaluate and eventually structure once we figure out our argument -- what we think all this stuff is ultimately saying. We are the types who tend to write the outline last. 

🟣 Other people are top-down writers. Top-down writers generate the outline of what they're writing first📋, and then attack their pile of stuff, slotting in the ideas, information, and data they've collected with the big picture view as a scaffold.

Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of us start with the pieces and figure out the picture as we go (bottom-up), others sketch out a picture first and then figure out the pieces (top-down). 🧩

If you have surmised by my use of 'we' and they' in these descriptions that I am a bottom-up writer, congratulations! 🥳 You are correct. ✅ There are, however, key things that bottom-up and top-down writers  have in common, particularly when it comes to writing dissertation literature reviews.  

✳️ All of us must collect and grapple with ideas, information, and data. Whichever kind of writer you are, this is an essential step.

✳️ All of us, whether we write the outline first or last, need to be sure that the headings in that outline are the steps in our argument and NOT a randomly ordered list of topics. The title of your outline should be your research question and the first line should be some version of My research question needs to be asked because . . . The headings should then be your main points, the patterns and trends you've identified in previous work that make your case (how you filled in three dots). The sub-headings should be the more granular evidence from previous studies that support those main points.

✳️ All of us will go through an iterative process. For those of us who start from the bottom and build up, we will create many interim structures before we settle on the finished one. As we go, one possible argument emerges, we set that out, have a re-think, and then re-structure it. Then we do more reading, which de-stabilises that structure, so we re-structure again to integrate the new information (re-re-structure?), and so on. For those of us who begin with an outline, we start slotting in the evidence, realise the outline has a missing step, re-jig the outline, slot in more evidence, notice that some of the evidence is actually better support for a different main point, re-re-jig the outline, and so on, until the final version -- the one that needs no more jigging, emerges. 

✳️ All of us should end up in the same place, with a rock-solid, well-argued case for why our research question needs to be asked. 

If we both eventually end up in the same place, why bother knowing which kind of writer we are? What are the advantages? 

➡️ A lot of the more generic guidance you'll encounter tends to assume there is only one kind of writer, and so only one way of writing. If you are the other kind of writer, this guidance may not make much sense to you or may give you the feeling that your way of writing is 'wrong', which of course it is not. If you know what kind of writer you are, you are in a better position to 'translate' the guidance and make it work for you. 

➡️ If you know about both strategies, you can experiment with both. You might find that at some stages of your drafting a bottom-up approach works best, perhaps at the very start. Once you've accounted for everything you've collected, you might find that the top-down strategy works best for later stages of your drafting. Alternatively, you might discover that you really work best with one strategy and stick with it. Either way, knowing about both strategies allows you to make an informed choice. 

By way of conclusion, I'll share a personal story. 🤗 I was once sitting on my floor, where I do most of my writing, happily sorting my pile of stuff into the first version of my argument. Someone happened by and asked what I thought I was doing wasting so much time and didn't I have anything better to do (😱). If you know what kind of writer you are, you can smile politely, thank such people for their advice, and carry on writing. 😉

* Marsen, S. 2013. Professional Writing. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater personal and professional success through more effective writing, thinking, and use of language. 

➡️ She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

🟢 Visit her website and email her from there: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟢 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

The Critical Appraisal

🔸Do a critical appraisal🔸

If you are a research student, you'll run into an assignment like this one sooner or later. But what is it really asking you to do? 🤔 The guidebooks will offer you clear, crisp definitions of what a critical appraisal is, like this one: 

❝The use of explicit, transparent methods to assess the data in published research, by systematically considering such factors as validity, adherence to reporting standards, methods, conclusion and generalisability❞ (from Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review, pg. 304).

Excellent! Now you know that you need to be explicit, transparent, and systematic. You need to assess the data in the research that has been published in your field. And there are any number of checklists 📋 you can consult that will help you zero in on what to look for (Are the conclusions warranted by the data? Does the analysis stand up? Does the study measure what it says it will measure? Have the methods been robustly justified and applied?).

But how do you actually do your critical appraisal? When you are sitting with a stack of studies 📚, you very naturally go through them one by one. You read the first study, go through your checklist of questions, spot some areas that don't quite stand up to scrutiny, and write that up, perhaps along lines like these: Smith and Jones 2018 put forward a number of valuable insights, but their case study approach does not warrant the conclusions made. And then you pick up the next study, and so on.

There is great value in this, as you are honing your critical eye, 🧐 learning about methods and methodology, and building your mental database of all the ways that your topic has thus far been studied.  All of these things are a necessary part of your learning as a research student. 

➡️ But here is something crucial in writing critical appraisals that seldom gets mentioned -- going through studies one by one and writing out separate evaluations for each study is only your starting point. It is a necessary step in your critical appraisal, but not the final step. 

If you simply put each evaluation in your chapter, you wind up with a series of separate appraisals. Each one might be wonderfully insightful, and each one might show that you really know your stuff. 

➡️ But your purpose in a critical appraisal is not to pick holes in previous studies to show that you know your stuff. If you are writing your literature review chapter, your purpose is to show why your research question needs to be asked. If you are writing your methodology and methods chapter, your purpose is to show that your methodology and methods are an appropriate and fitting way to answer your question. 

The one-by-one appraisal process you started with will not establish either of these things. What you need now is the next step, which is to identify patterns and trends in the studies you've just read and assessed. You need to critically assess the body of work in your field, not separate studies one at a time.

➡️ And how do you do that? Try this: once you've finished step one, go back through that material and start extracting some lists (in tables, in a spreadsheet, on note cards -- whatever works for you). Record key information, such as all the research questions that were asked, all of the methods used, all of the weaknesses that you found, all of the strengths that you found, all of the conclusions and findings. Then start sorting this information, putting like with like, looking for contrasts, and so on. What are the overall patterns? Do you find that most work in your field is qualitative rather than quantitative, for example? Or maybe you find that work in your field is dominated by a specific approach to analysis while others have been left untried? Or maybe work in your field has stemmed from some pioneering papers whose assumptions now need to be revisited? In this way, you move from evaluating single studies in isolation to using those evaluations as evidence in your argument, either establishing why your research question should be asked, or establishing why your methods are justified. 

And now you are on your way to what a critical appraisal should be 😊

*Booth, A., Sutton, A., and Papaioannou, D. 2016. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review. 2nd ed. London: Sage.

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater professional success through more effective writing, thinking, and use of language. 

She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

🟢 Hope on to her website and contact her from there: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟢 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

Is It Relevant?

Your literature review should cover the relevant literature. 

Well of course it should. This is a piece of advice you’ll often find in textbooks on doing dissertations. It seems so obvious that it is easy to skim over it. Cover the relevant literature. Right. Go it. And how hard could it be? That article is relevant, that one isn’t, job done. 

Or is it? 😕 Like many things you’ll discover as you do your literature review, deciding what is relevant turns out to be surprisingly complex. There is more here to think about than you might have first supposed, and that is what this blog is about. 

In some cases, you will indeed find that one source is clearly relevant and another clearly isn’t. In many other cases, however, there are at least two intermediate categories between relevant and not relevant:

✅ don’t know yet, and 

✅ marginally relevant. 

We’ll deal with each one in turn. 

There will be times, especially in the early stages of your dissertation, when you simply don’t know yet if something is relevant. This often shows up as doubt. Does it fit? Could it fit? Do I need to tweak my research question? Am I on the right track? You have your two clear piles – relevant and not relevant, but every time you plonk the article into the discard pile, you fish it out again. What if it is relevant? What if I haven’t understood it properly? I just don’t know! 😱

This indecision may feel frustrating, but it is a healthy part of the process. Your research project develops as you go, so there will be many points along the way when you aren’t immediately sure about something. That is okay. 😊👍 The thing to do is to recognise that the temporary indecision is actually a decision: you don’t know yet. In between Relevant and Not Relevant, make yourself a pile for Not Sure Yet. For every source in this pile, record the basics (what the study is asking, what it found, what its methods were) and why you aren’t sure. Be as specific here as you can. Then, just leave it in the Not Sure Yet pile and go on to the next one. 

Maybe in a week, or two, or in a month, or in a year, you will encounter another article and say Ah ha! Now I know how that article is relevant! 😃 Or maybe, as you periodically review your Not Sure Yet pile from an increasingly sophisticated vantage point, you’ll be able to see at a glance why the source that originally gave you such angst either is or is not relevant. 

This brings us to the second point, the marginally relevant sources. Dealing with these takes up a surprising amount of time. At first, this seems counter intuitive, as marginally relevant suggests something you can deal with briefly. In your final write-up, this will be true – your treatment of what is marginally relevant will be brief. But getting to that confident articulation of what is worth mentioning but not centrally relevant involves some complex thinking and careful analysis. 🤔

An example from my own practice in writing literature reviews may be helpful here. I give such examples from time to time in this blog because with my own work and I can point to the decision-making process I went through as I wrestled a pile of reading notes into a finished article. This process goes straight to the heart of the matter when it comes to writing a literature review (or anything, really), but I find that what it entails is often missing from the textbooks and how-guides. I therefore share it with you here. Was it helpful? ✍ Let me know in the comments! ✍

This comes from my paper on weird -y suffixes in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS). I approached this from a linguistic perspective, as my area of expertise is stylistics (the study of choice in language). As I was reading the literature on Buffy for my review, I noticed that the bulk of the work was coming from other fields. That body of work was relevant, as it was on the text I was studying, but not centrally so, as it was not interested in matters of language. In the final version of my paper, all of this work was dealt with in a single sentence: 

‘In the growing body of BTVS literature, two areas of enquiry have emerged as particularly salient: interpreting the vampires and demons as symbols for society’s fears (Erickson, 2002; Jowett, 2002; Krzywinska, 2002); and interrogating the transgressive potential of the show with respect to gender (Braun, 2001: 91; Graham, 2002; Levy, 2003; Owen, 1999; Pender 2002; Williams, 2002); race and class (Alessio, 2001; Edwards, 2002); and power (Buinicki and Enns, 2002; Playden, 2001)’ (Mandala 2007: 53). 

Getting to this single sentence, however, took several months of work, primarily for the following reasons. 

📌 There are 13 papers cited here so in the first place I had to read and annotate them all. Yes, they were all marginally relevant, but I still had to read them all carefully to decide why and how. 

📌After reading and annotating I had to analyse my notes, which I did through a process of thematic coding. The result of that analysis is presented succinctly above: this body of work comes down to two main areas, a dissection of fears and an interest in transgressive potential. The second area had three sub-themes, gender; race/class; and power. The 13 papers did not announce themselves as belonging to these themes; rather, that was something I had to decide and articulate after thinking carefully about the body of work as whole (instead of one study at a time). 

📌 To deal with the theme on transgressive potential, I had to come to grips with media and cultural studies, a subject outside my own area of expertise. Having trained as a linguist, I had never covered this but no matter -- it was still my responsibility. This meant taking some time to dig into the tertiary sources to figure out what this field was about so that I could fully understand the papers that emerged from them. 

📌 To put it all together, I drafted many versions of my review. Does it surprise you to learn that what eventually became a single sentence in my final version was originally 6 pages long? That might sound like wasted time, but each articulation of the longer version increased my mastery over the previous work and why it mattered to my research. Over time, this drafting process gradually distilled for me what was most essential, allowing me to deal fairly but briefly with the marginally relevant material so that I could expand on what was centrally relevant. 

And there you have it – what it really takes to deal with sources that are marginally relevant. The next time you come across a paper that deals briefly with marginal material, spend a bit of time over it. What amount and kind of work went into it? What can you learn from that about doing your own review? 

If anyone is interested in my paper or the sources cited therein, the references is Mandala, S. (2007). ‘Solidarity and the Scoobies: An Analysis of the -y Suffix in the Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Language and Literature 16 (1): 53-73. 

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater personal and professional success through more effective writing and use of language. 

She specialises in dissertation literature review training for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

🟩 Visit her website: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟩 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

🟩 If you know someone who will find this blog useful, please feel free to share it in your networks. 😊

Insights for 2025: Remembering What the Dissertation Literature Review is For

 Happy New Year! 🥳 Here it is, the start of January, often a time to sit down and make some firm resolutions that, this year, we are really going to stick to. So if you have your bullet point list already populated with things like:

🔆 Get up an hour earlier and write for 1 hour everyday

🔆 Read and annotate 5 articles every week

🔆 Have the complete first draft of my literature review chapter done by March 31st, 

great stuff! Keep going.

This time of year is also, however, a good time to take stock -- to step back and reassess things. Are we doing the right things for the right reasons? Over the course of a year, it is very easy to get so bogged down in the details that we lose sight of our real mission. We set out with a clear vision, translate that vision into goals, and then set out the tasks to achieve those goals. But over time, the tasks tend to take on a life of their own and without realising it they become the mission. Just get to the end of the list! we say to ourselves, hoping that by the time Friday comes we'll find most of our tasks done and crossed off. 📝

I think this tendency to slip into mindlessly chasing tasks happens because we forget to take into account how much we'll learn and develop as we spend a year working on something. Our overall mission may stay the same, but what we do to achieve it needs to be periodically updated as we become more advanced in our skills and knowledge. Ticking things off our list is excellent (and if you read this blog regularly, you know I love lists!). 📋 ✔ But every now and again, we need to step back and think about what it is that is driving our list in the first place. 

And that is what today's blog is about. As we set out on a brand new year, are we still aligned with our guiding star? 🌟As we sit amongst our piles of papers and notes, digging our way through, do we remember why we are doing a literature review in the first the place? Or are we demotivated because we have we lost sight of what it's all for?

Regular readers of this blog will know that the purpose of your literature review is to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. And this is true -- that is what your literature review should do. But why should it do that? Why is it necessary to establish why your question should be asked? Or, as a number of my students have asked over the years, Why can't we just write about our stuff? Why can't we just ask and answer our question and leave it at that?

🔑 My answer is this: we make the case for why our question needs to be asked in order to identify how the answer we come up with counts as a contribution -- how it advances the sum of human learning. What new and unique piece of knowledge does your research put in the world and why does it matter? There is no way to know that if you don't know the state of your field. How does what you now know build on what we already know? You can't see that unless you have identified the prevailing patterns and trends in what we already know. That is what the textbooks and how-to guides mean when they talk about mastering the literature or effective evaluation or locating your study with respect previous research.

Was this blog helpful for you or your students? Want to know more about translating the why of doing a literature review into the how? 

✅ Hop onto my website www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290 and drop me a message to talk about master classes, day-long workshops, or short courses. I'd love to hear from you 😊

The Twelve Tips of Christmas

 It is that time of year again. 🎄🎉 We are frantically getting those last things done, running around buying presents 🎁, writing cards, and doing all the other things we do to prepare for the holiday season. If, in amongst all that you are also one of those brave people writing a dissertation 📚, you might also be setting aside some precious undistracted time to work on your literature review. In honour of the season, I wanted to share with you my 12 most successful mistakes. Yes, you read that correctly  -- successful mistakes. Doing anything for the first time involves some stumbling around, and I certainly did my share of that. It was when I fell down and got back up that I learned the most, and in this blog that is what I want to share with you. 

So, here it is -- my 12 most productive mistakes from 30 years of writing literature reviews and what they taught me.

1. Not understanding the role of description. If you read my blog regularly, you'll know your literature review is an argument in which you make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. Your evidence for this argument comes from previous research.  However, in order to get to the stage of putting  that argument together, you first have to understand the previous research, and that means a lengthy phase of describing those studies to yourself. Value this, as it is essential. But don't stop there, as this phase is just for you. For your dissertation, use your knowledge of each source to construct your argument and work out the evidence for it. ✍

2. Thinking that the unit of analysis in my literature review was each study, and trying without much success to figure out how the summary of each study was or wasn't evidence in my argument. That sent me back down the describe-every-study rabbit hole, until I figured out that the unit was not the study per se, but the findings of all the studies.  What were the patterns and trends in all the findings? That was the thing to figure out. 🤔

3. Writing endless outlines but not getting anywhere. Finally, I figured out that this did not work, at least not for me, because my outlines were lists of topics.  Lists of topics do not allow you to work out the structure of your argument.  For that, I finally hit on the card-sorting technique, which allowed me to determine my main points (my research question needs to be asked because. . . . ) and the evidence for each point. For more on that, see my post on how your literature review is like a qualitative research project.

4. Thinking that frustration was my enemy.  It certainly feels like an enemy 😖, but over time I came to understand that frustration was a sign that I was moving out of my comfort zone  -- and moving out of your comfort zone is the only way to learn and make progress. If you stay where you are comfortable you never have to grapple with anything new. You will avoid frustration that way, but you will also avoid important breakthroughs in your understanding.

5. Confusing productive breaks with displacement activities. We all need breaks when we are writing. Sometimes we hit what feels like an impenetrable snarl, and taking a walk 🏃 helps us to think in new ways. But know the difference between a break that enables more creative and productive thinking and the displacement activity, which is really just a form of procrastination. If you are thinking Oh, I'll just do the dishes before I start, and since I've done the dishes I might as well do the counter tops . . . that is a displacement activity. If you go down that road, your house might sparkle, but you won't be any further along on your literature review. 

6. Thinking that if I ended the day as confused as I began that I hadn't made any progress. This is not true. A literature review is a complex thing and some of the issues you have to deal with won't be solved in a day. If you stop work some days and all you have is a list of things you don't understand, that is progress. Now you know what you don't know yet. 💡

7. Trying to write in the afternoon and finally figuring out that I am a morning person 🌅. The literature review involves a lot of reading, thinking, and writing, but there is also a fair amount of administrative work. Figure out when you are at your best and do your writing then. Plough through the admin stuff during the other part of the day. 

8. Thinking I should be able to concentrate solidly for hours without a break and getting annoyed with myself when I couldn't. 😠 I found that I got immersed for about 30 minutes, then needed a micro-break -- to look up, shift my gaze, roll my shoulders -- then could do another 30 minutes, and so on. I was relieved to discover that this was normal. 

9. Trying to find shortcuts. On a day when I just couldn't face more note-taking, I would highlight things instead as I read. And that way, it wasn't even like work, as I could sit in my cosy chair and just read. I told myself I would go back to the highlighted bits and convert them into notes later so that I could figure out how they fit into my argument (or not). That never worked, not once, and was always wasted time. Inevitably, I lost track of the highlighted material and just wound up re-reading and taking the notes I should have taken the first time.  📖

10. Worrying about the word limit. The word limit is a tangible metric and can be a useful guide, but it is not the goal. Your goal is not to write a certain number of words. Your goal is to put together a rock-solid argument for why your research question needs to be asked. I discovered that when I did that, the word-limit took care of itself. 📘

11. Trying to edit before I knew all the steps in my argument and before I had assembled all of the evidence. This just led to hopeless confusion and much wasted time. When you have your argument nailed down and all the evidence assembled, you can spot extraneous detail immediately and just get rid of it without second-guessing yourself. ✂

12. Trying to work straight through Christmas. The holiday period frees up some time, and one year I decided I would only do the bare minimum for Christmas and then put my head down and write. I just made myself miserable and tired and wound up having to take a break when Christmas was over. There wasn't even any turkey left. 

Whatever and however you celebrate this season, allow yourself that time. I wish you the joy of it!