Reverse Engineering a Review
An exercise I often use with my students is to reverse engineer a literature review to work out how they are put together. This helps to get students thinking about what authors actually have to do in order to turn reading notes into a review. The analogy here is with creative writing: if you were a novice creative writer and you wanted to work out how to write great characters, you would not just read novels with great characters but study them carefully to see how the authors of those works created them. So as novice literature reviewers , I tell my students, train yourselves to learn from more experienced writers . As I guide my students through this process so that they can eventually do it more independently, one text I often use for this purpose is an article on English in multilingual advertising by An H. Kuppens (2010), which I have on my list of favorite reviews . Using the following short quote from the Introduction, I ask my students to speculate about what ...