Literature Reviews: A Blog for the Exasperated from Writing Works Consulting

Mind maps promise a great deal. Organise your thoughts! Find connections! Make structure fun! And it’s true. It can be fun. We can spend many happy hours putting our ideas into colourful bubble shapes and connecting them with lines.  It feels like progress. But is it? Let’s say you’re doing a study on mindfulness practices and productivity at work. In a typical mind map, the main topic would be in a big circle at the centre, maybe ‘Mindfulness at Work’.  Radiating out from this central point towards the corners and edges of the page would be related themes, each in a smaller circle, such as productivity, stress reduction, organisational culture, focus , and criticisms . And each of these sub-themes would generate even smaller topic bubbles based on what the papers in each cluster tended to cover. Stress reduction, for example, might have bubbles representing papers on burn-out reduction, emotional regulation , and improved moods .  Circles, Lines, and Dead Ends   You...

Order your review chronologically . You’ve probably come across this idea before – or maybe toyed with it yourself, especially if you’re sitting on a massive pile of notes and wondering what to do next. You know you have to corral it all somehow, give it some sort of structure, turn it into a chapter or section worth someone’s time to read. But how?  The Temptation This is when the chronological temptation starts creeping in. Every finding has a year on it. The years can be grouped together. Look, I can start right now – there’s a cluster from 2015 . . .  It feels like you are doing something. If feels like you are bringing order to chaos. It feels like you are finally making progress and sorting it all out.  Beware of those feelings.  The Reality There are many ways to bring order to chaos. You could organise findings alphabetically by the surnames of their authors. Or you could group findings by the different journals they appear in. Or according to the order you ...

How Do You Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising?  This is an excellent question. And a very fair one. Research textbooks, advisors, the handy checklists and self-study videos – all of them will tell you that a literature review must synthesise previous sources, not summarise them.  Fine. But how do you do that? Advice on this is harder to find, leaving many of us tearing our hair out in frustration. I know that’s how I felt, back when I was surrounded by piles of papers and stacks of notes and wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing with it all.  That’s why I’m dedicating this blog, the first of 2026, to the how in how to stop summarising and start synthesising.  But First, Some Preliminaries Summarising is what happens if you describe individual studies one at a time ( this study said this; that study showed that ). This doesn’t put anything new in the world – it only reports on information that already exists. Synthesis, in contrast, is all about f...

The Holiday Season Is Approaching Fast! The winter break is nearly here. Classes finish soon, the marking will eventually be completed – if you’re doing any – your admin tasks will stay done for a while, and the meeting invites will slow to a trickle. At least for a bit (!!)  And you’ll have what every research writer wants: clear, unbroken time to sit down and finally make some progress. It's the perfect opportunity to dig into your literature review, to ‘locate your work in the context of your field’ and all that.  “There’s plenty of training for methodology and methods. But for the literature review? Somehow, you’re just supposed to know about that, without much training.”  Excellent! But how will you go about doing that, exactly? You start going through your notes. You’ve got piles of stuff on methodology and methods, pages and pages on analysis, and a whole separate notebook on ethics. But for your literature review? Hmm. There was an assigned chapter from one of the...

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 mor...

  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 ...