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

Your literature review should cover the relevant literature.  Well of course it should. This is a piece of advice you’ll often find in textbooks on doing dissertations. It seems so obvious that it is easy to skim over it. Cover the relevant literature. Right. Go it. And how hard could it be? That article is relevant, that one isn’t, job done.  Or is it? 😕 Like many things you’ll discover as you do your literature review, deciding what is relevant turns out to be surprisingly complex. There is more here to think about than you might have first supposed, and that is what this blog is about.  In some cases, you will indeed find that one source is clearly relevant and another clearly isn’t. In many other cases, however, there are at least two intermediate categories between relevant and not relevant: ✅  don’t know yet,  and  ✅  marginally relevant .  We’ll deal with each one in turn.  There will be times, especially in the early stages of your ...

 Happy New Year! 🥳 Here it is, the start of January, often a time to sit down and make some firm resolutions that, this year, we are really going to stick to. So if you have your bullet point list already populated with things like: 🔆 Get up an hour earlier and write for 1 hour everyday 🔆 Read and annotate 5 articles every week 🔆 Have the complete first draft of my literature review chapter done by March 31st,  great stuff! Keep going. This time of year is also, however, a good time to take stock -- to step back and reassess things. Are we doing the right things for the right reasons? Over the course of a year, it is very easy to get so bogged down in the details that we lose sight of our real mission. We set out with a clear vision, translate that vision into goals, and then set out the tasks to achieve those goals. But over time, the tasks tend to take on a life of their own and without realising it they become the mission. Just get to the end of the list! we say to our...