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.