Gamify Your Literature Review

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 X (X being your particular topic).  Here are a few versions of this sentence from some papers I plucked randomly from one of my office shelves (What?! You don’t have a shelf full of papers yet? Acquire one immediately! 😊)

 

• ‘The importance of including counterarguments and rebuttals for making written argumentation persuasive has been underscored by much research’ (Liu & Stapleton 2014: 118, who block cite multiple papers from 1991-2007 in support of this claim).

• ‘Expressive writing studies are plentiful and the once anemic domain of letter writing as a vehicle for improving health has seen a resent surge of interest’ (Toepfer & Walker 2009: 182, block citing papers published between 2001-2009 in support). 

• ‘The concept of mindsets has received considerable attention in education in recent years’ (Irie et al. 2018: 576, with multiple papers cited in support as the review progresses). 

Not to be outdone, here is one from one of my papers.

 

• ‘The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS) has attracted a great deal of academic attention in recent years’ (Mandala 2007: 53, with a number of papers cited in support as the review unfolds).

And the ‘fun’ part? Set yourself a target for the day’s reading and see how many of these you can find. Gamify it further by making this a competition with your research chat group (What?! No chat group? See above 😊). Vote on the ones you like best. Look for the ones you think are most effective or creative or whatever. Get out your thesaurus and start coming up with your own versions.  See how many you can do in 10 minutes. Write some purposely outrageous ones you know you will not use, just for a chuckle.  And who knows? An outrageous version might lead you to a good one (a thought inspired by Edward deBono’s work on thinking).

 

There is much more to your literature review than your first sentence, as the pages of this blog amply demonstrate.  But starting is often the hardest part. So have some fun.

 

References

 

Irie, K., Ryan, S., and Mercer, S. 2018. ‘Using Q Methodology to Investigate Pre-Service EFT Teachers’ Mindsets about Teaching Competences’. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching. 8(3): 575-598.

Liu, F. and Stapleton, P. 2014. ‘Counterargumentation and the Cultivation of Critical Thinking in Argumentative Writing: Investigating Washback from a High-Stakes Test’. System 45: 117-128.

 

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.

 

Toepfer, S. and Walker, K. 2009. ‘Letters of Gratitude: Improving Well-Being through Expressive Writing’. Journal of Writing Research 1 (3): 181-198.

On Paraphrasing

 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 quotes already so you're going to paraphrase for a while? This too is surface-y. Deciding when to quote and when to paraphrase should be based on your engagement with your sources -- the dialogue you have with them when you are figuring out how patterns and trends in previous work add up to why your research question needs to be asked. Who agrees with you? Who doesn't? Whose work aligns with yours? Whose work gets close, but doesn't quite hit the mark? What will you 'say back' to these sources in your literature review as you establish why your research needs to be done? Where will you place them in those patterns and trends you have traced out?

Deciding when to quote and when to paraphrase on the basis of your on-going dialogue with previous work in your field requires the more complex version of paraphrasing.  This is not a surface operation, but an act of understanding. True paraphrasing emerges from a deep understanding of someone else's argument and a true appreciation for what their argument means for your research question. What is the crux of what someone is saying? Can you state that clearly in a few sentences, in words that a) show that you clearly understand; and b) would make sense to someone who had not read the source? You won't get to this by tinkering with surface features. You can only do this when you really understand the essence of what a previous piece of work sought to find out, and what they ultimately found (or didn't find, as the case may be).

And how do you get to this point? Practice. Take a piece of previous work from your pile of literature review sources -- a shorter piece, and one that you do have a good understanding of -- one that you read and said, 'Ah -- now that makes sense'.  Read it again. Several times. Now set it aside.  Give yourself a limit of 5 lines.  Try for something like this: The authors, interested in X, do a study on Y, and find Z. Remember that this is not a fill-in-the-blank exercise.  What you put for X, Y, and Z should be a fair assessment, in your own words, of what the authors were seeking to do. And remember that you must put the author attribution, as well -- a paraphrase is still someone else's thought. If it helps, try paraphrasing out loud to yourself first, as though you were telling a friend about this really interesting paper you had read, and then writing that down.  Or maybe tell a friend for real, if you have a particularly patient friend (😊), and then do your paraphrase.

As you get better and better at this -- and you will, if you practice -- graduate to more complex pieces. You'll find you are paraphrasing authentically, as part of your engagement with previous work and how it is evidence for why your research needs to be done, rather than tinkering with surface features for superficial reasons.