On the Art of Intentional Drafting: Confronting the Hard Questions

Drafting: Preparing Preliminary Versions of Whatever It Is You’re Writing

 As with most definitions, this tells you what a draft is, but not why it’s important. If you didn’t know anything about drafting and read this definition, you still wouldn’t know much because the important bits are left out, such as what drafting is for and how you go about it. 

That’s why this month’s blog is dedicated to the art of intentional drafting and why it matters when you’re writing your literature review. 

The Three Phases of Drafting 

In what is still one of the best accounts of academic writing I’ve ever read, Roland Huff points out that drafting has three main phases. The first phase is generating, where you just get things down – thoughts, ideas, topics, reading notes, bits of analysis, quotes, questions – it all just gets thrown down on page or screen, in whatever order and without worrying too much about grammar, punctuation or spelling. 

The second phase is the much more disciplined problem-solving phase, where you consciously wrestle with what you’ve generated. What, ultimately, do you have? What is it telling you? What is your argument? What is the evidence for that argument? What order should you put it in? 

The third phase is editing, dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s, checking the spell check, making sure you’ve quoted accurately, and so on. 

Are You Skipping the Problem-Solving Phase? 

In my experience – doing my own writing, mentoring others, and reading thousands of drafts – I find that we are very good at phase one, the free-form unmonitored generating phase of drafting. It fits well with the ricocheting way our thoughts work, pin-balling from one thing to another in a seemingly random fashion. 

"Have you confronted your biases? Or have you only included work that supports what you already believe?"

We also tend to be very good at the third phase of drafting, editing. That can feel very satisfying. We merrily go through our draft, ticking things off our list. Completed that sentence, fixed that footnote, corrected that quote, sorted all the places I said ‘their’ when it should have been ‘there’. (Homophones! They get me every time!). 

So when we are writing, there is a tendency, perhaps even a temptation, to generate ideas in phase one, edit those in phase three, and then think the job is done. 

Do the Writerly Heavy Lifting – Your Literature Review Will Thank You 

And that’s where the problem starts, because it skips phase two, the heavy-lifting phase. That’s why you

get feedback such as Good ideas, but needs development or You’ve done some good reading, but this just summarises or Have you sent the right file? 

The second phase is the hardest, and the most frustrating, and the most time consuming. But it is crucial. 

It is in this second phase of drafting that you face and resolve the questions that matter, the questions that will decide whether your literature review does its job or just rehashes stuff that’s already been said. 

• Can you answer the ‘so what’ question for what you’ve read? If not, why not? 
• Is your evidence solid, or do you need to do more reading?
• Have you done a fair assessment of work that disagrees with your position? 
• If something you’ve read requires you to change your position, have you? 
• Have you skipped over things simply because you didn’t understand them? 
• Have you confronted your biases? 
• Or have you just included work that supports what you already believe? 

When you embrace it and let it do its work, the second phase of drafting will also reveal to you errors in your thinking as you wrestle with your argument. And we all make these errors. It is part of the process of growing and learning as you write. 

Here's an example from my own work. When I was writing my book on science fiction (sf), I encountered a lot of literary critics who argued that sf produced flat characters. I was determined to argue the opposite and show that there were plenty of round characters. And I realised, during the second phase of drafting, that I was flouncing around like a spoiled child, taking what were essentially flat characters and trying to force them into being round simply because I wanted to make an oppositional argument. 

"As if by magic, the new path through my chapter laid itself out before me."

Crestfallen, I took myself in hand and confronted the hard question: Were the critics right? Did sf produce mostly flat characters? Would I have to scrap this chapter or write something weak and concessionary? And then it hit me: well yes, sf did produce flat characters. But are flat characters necessarily uninteresting? Or worse than round ones? Those were the questions I needed to explore. The issue wasn’t flat characters in sf; it was the assumption that they were necessarily unliterary that needed to be tackled. As if by magic, the new path through the chapter laid itself out before me. If I had run away from the hard questions that the second phase of drafting revealed to me, I would never have seen that path. 

And finally, it is in this second phase of drafting where you do the work of greatest consequence for your literature review: you nail down your argument and put together a rock-solid case for why your research question needs to be asked. You establish why your research is going to make an original contribution to knowledge. 

So by all means, generate excellent ideas. Be a thorough editor. But don’t skip the hard part. 

References

Huff, Roland. 1983. ‘Teaching Revision: A Model of the Drafting Process’. College English 45 (6): 800-16. 
Mandala, S. 2010. Language in Science Fiction and Fantasy: The Question of Style. London: Continuum. 

Your Blog Author 

Dr Susan Mandala is founding director of Writing Works Consulting. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was for many years an academic at the University of Sunderland, where her favourite role was training PhD candidates to write literature reviews. 

A specialist in the study of language, writing, and style, Susan has 30 years’ experience as a teacher, trainer, and workshop facilitator and is dedicated to helping people turn great ideas into results with impact through clearer writing, sharper thinking, and more strategic use of language. 

She develops and delivers writing workshops in a range of areas, specialising in academic writing, grammar for writing, and analytical report writing. 

Her signature workshop, How to Really Write Your Literature Review, runs three times a year via Zoom in October, January, and June (registration and payment through Eventbrite). Watch this space for when registrations next open!

If you are a research culture manager or commission research training for doctoral candidates, graduate students, or academic staff, contact me about a workshop for your institution. I’d love to hear from you. 

• Book a free video chat: https://calendar.app.google/kwKTRArFjJxhu27r7
• Hop over to my website: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk
• Connect on LinkedIN and DM me: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

 “Susan’s workshop was just what I needed.” – Jane Pickthall

How to Really Write Your Literature Review: A Workshop for You

 A Blog for the New Academic Year 2025-2026

It can easily happen when we’re new to this whole business of enquiry. Maybe you’re a PhD candidate or a professional moving from practice into research. You’re committed, passionate about your subject, and excited about making a contribution to knowledge. You’ve got a rock-star question and an outline of your methods. But you've hit a snag. Your literature review. 

You have a gigantic pile of studies stacked around your desk -- or a file full to bursting on your computer, depending on how you prefer to do these things. You’ve done the recommended reading in the how-to books, sat through the self-study tutorials, and followed the easy-step guides. It’s still not entirely clear from all this what you are expected to do, exactly, but you give it your best shot. 

"You love your research. You can’t wait to dig in. But you’ve hit a snag. Your literature review."

You sink months into a draft -- frustrating, hair-tearing, pen-chewing months. Surely, that will do the trick. But the feedback when it comes is like a punch in the stomach: Too descriptive. Critically evaluate the studies. Link them together. Don’t summarise, synthesise. You sink into your chair and randomly thumb the pages. Link the studies? Synthesise? What does that even mean?! 

 

How to Really Write Your Literature Review: A Workshop to Keep You on Track 

Here at Writing Works Consulting, I understand the challenges you face as a new researcher. I’ve been there. There is plenty of advice on what to do, but very little on how. That’s why I’m delighted to announce that my workshop How to Really Write Your Literature Review – for new researchers just like you – is now available to take online. 

 “If you find this blog helpful, you can now get even more great advice in my workshop How to Really Write Your Literature Review.”

In this workshop, I cut through all the confusion and show you what you really need to know to write your literature review. You’ll learn how to: 

• Break out of the description trap 
• Turn a pile of notes into a case for your research question 
• Move from critiquing single studies to analysing a body of scholarship 
• Identify patterns and trends in previous research (spotting that mysterious ‘gap’) 
• Use these patterns and trends as evidence in your argument 
• Organise and rhetorically craft your review 

 “Susan’s workshop was just what I needed.” – Jane Pickthall 

Spaces are Limited So Book Your Place Now

Don’t let frustration derail your dissertation. Book your place now and keep your PhD on track with How to Really Write Your Literature Review. 

• Date:14 October 2025 
• Time: 5:00-8:00, BST 
• Where: On-line via Zoom 
• Cost: £85 per person 
•  Register: Via Eventbrite ⬇️

 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-to-really-write-your-literature-review-tickets-1692672040639

 Lasting Value 

 For the price of the workshop, you also get a bundle of freebies to support you as you put what you've learned into practice. 

• Access to up to 3 Zoom drop-in sessions with me for follow-up questions. 
• A PDF with answers to FAQs, such as 'How do I know when I’m finished?' 
• A learners’ pack outlining the techniques introduced for future reference. 

➡️ Know anyone else who might be interested? Please share this blog to your network. 

Your Workshop Deliverer and Blog Author

Dr Susan Mandala is founding director of Writing Works Consulting. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was for many years an academic at the University of Sunderland, where one of her favourite roles was training PhD candidates to write literature reviews. A specialist in the study of language, writing, and style, she has 30 years’ experience as a teacher, trainer, and workshop facilitator.

 “The approachable, informal delivery meant that we moved from basic concepts to tackling review ourselves without a bump in the road, and Susan was constantly guiding and provoking the group to take us further.” – Iain Rowan

Can I Use an AI to Summarise Research Papers for Me?

😞 This blog begins with a big sigh because, yes, these days, you can now use an AI to summarise papers for you. 

➡️ But should you?

That is another question entirely. 

You’ll make your own decision on this one as the glorious, sovereign individual you are. 😊

⚠️ But speaking for myself, my decision on this one is a very firm NO and in this blog I outline three reasons why. 

📚 If you get an AI to summarise a paper for you, you are not reading it for yourself. It doesn’t matter how good the summary is, or how thorough, or how shiny the new AI is. 

If you yourself don’t read the original, you can’t really know what it said. 

You remain ignorant of the paper’s actual premises and claims because you don’t have any real knowledge -- you only have what Shane Parrish (2023: 165)* calls the ‘illusion of knowledge’. Your job in your literature review is to evaluate previous work to make the case for why your research question should be asked, and you can’t make any good decisions about that if you haven’t actually read any of that previous work. 

➡️ If you want to develop a secure understanding of what a source says and why it matters, you simply have to read it for yourself. There is no substitute for this. 

📚 When we report on our research, we are responsible for the claims we make. We cannot stand by what we have said if we don’t really know anything. 

Let’s say you have used an AI to summarise papers for you and have written your literature review based on those summaries. What will happen when a reader – your examiner, perhaps – says something like ‘I see here you have dismissed X’s finding about Y. On my reading of X, this dismissal is perhaps hasty. Tell me more about your decision here.’

😟 What will you say? You can’t really account for the decision because you haven’t made it – an AI has. And you can’t have a wider discussion of X’s work because you haven’t read X yourself. 

➡️ Summarising is not a neutral act. It is a series of value judgements. When we are doing our research, we need to be the ones making those judgements so that we can take responsibility for them. 

📚 We diminish our own experience and de-skill ourselves if we outsource our reading of original papers. To demonstrate this, let me tell you about a little experiment I did. I took a foundational paper in my field, H.P. Grice’s Logic and Conversation **, that I had not used in a while, re-read it thoroughly and carefully as the me I am today (different from the me when I last read it), and wrote my own summary of it. 

🤖 I then got ChatGPT to do a summary of the same paper and compared the two reading experiences – the reading of the AI summary, and my reading of Grice’s original. 

🟥 The AI version was a summary of summaries, a pre-digested compilation of tertiary sources. It was the consensus view of Grice, what most people remember about the paper. The problem with this is that the ‘remembered’ version drifts away from the original over time, so if we depend on that we aren’t really engaging with the original. 

Reading the AI summary was flat, perfunctory, soon forgotten, and meant little. There was nothing in it I didn’t understand, so there was nothing I had to struggle with or learn. It stimulated no curiosity, no sense of agreement or disagreement, and led to no questions. There were no ‘Hang on a minute, what does this really mean?’ moments. 

🟩 Reading Grice himself was a deep and valuable learning experience that will go on to inform other learning experiences I will have. There were things I had to grapple with, even on a re-read, because the original is complex and multi-layered. 

🔑 But what struck me the most in my comparison between the AI summary and the original was Grice’s inimitable style. Something of the man Grice was reached me through his style. It was a style I could learn from, a language that enriched my own. In my reading of the original, I was in touch with the living, breathing soul who wrote it. 

🔴 What am in touch with when I read AI generated text? 

➡️ We sometimes think of style as inconsequential, some sort of optional extra when write. But that is not the case. Style is expression of our humanity. 

🤔 Will you use an AI to summarise papers for you? That’s up to you. But consider carefully what the actual gains and losses are as you make that decision.

* Parrish, S. 2023. Clear Thinking: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions. Penguin Random House UK

** Grice, H.P. 1975. 'Logic and Conversation', in Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds.). Syntax and Semantics: Volume 3: Speech Acts. 41-58. New York: Academic Press. 

✳️✳️✳️✳️✳️✳️✳️✳️

Susan Mandala, PhD | Writing and Language Awareness Consultant | Founder and Director, Writing Works Consulting

Susan 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.

➡️ Interested in workshop? Contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course.

🟢 Leave a comment here on the blog. 

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

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

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

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