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

Doing your literature review can be a real slog. Believe me, I know.  I like doing literature reviews and even I think it is a bit of a trudge sometimes.  But if you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that it simply must done -- there are no short cuts. You have to come to grips with the body of work that precedes your research. And that means reading many, many papers in order to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. And, annoyingly, you will have to read papers that in the end turn out to be irrelevant. How else to know if they are relevant or not? Yes, a pain, I grant you.   But can you have fun along the way, too? That is what I dare to suggest in today’s blog.   If you read literature reviews for long enough, you begin to see certain patterns in the way they are structured and written,    For example, many reviews begin, or state somewhere near their start, some version of  There have been many studies of ...

 My students taught me something the other day. Paraphrasing can mean two different things. There's an easy version, and a hard version and -- you guessed it -- the easy version is what you might be most familiar with, but it is the hard version that you need for your literature review. The easy version is when you take a quote, change some of the key words (perhaps with a trusty thesaurus), maybe alter the sentence structure a bit, and Voila! The quote is now in your own words, you give the author attribution, and you're good to go.   But are you? Notice that in the easy version, you don't really have to fully understand the quote, or how it might or might not be evidence for why your research question needs to be asked. You could even do this by picking a quote at random from any source.  Paraphrasing this way is mostly a surface operation -- you don't have to think very hard about it. And why are you paraphrasing this way? Is it because you feel you have too many...