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

How Do You Stop Summarising and Start Synthesising?  This is an excellent question. And a very fair one. Research textbooks, advisors, the handy checklists and self-study videos – all of them will tell you that a literature review must synthesise previous sources, not summarise them.  Fine. But how do you do that? Advice on this is harder to find, leaving many of us tearing our hair out in frustration. I know that’s how I felt, back when I was surrounded by piles of papers and stacks of notes and wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing with it all.  That’s why I’m dedicating this blog, the first of 2026, to the how in how to stop summarising and start synthesising.  But First, Some Preliminaries Summarising is what happens if you describe individual studies one at a time ( this study said this; that study showed that ). This doesn’t put anything new in the world – it only reports on information that already exists. Synthesis, in contrast, is all about f...

The Holiday Season Is Approaching Fast! The winter break is nearly here. Classes finish soon, the marking will eventually be completed – if you’re doing any – your admin tasks will stay done for a while, and the meeting invites will slow to a trickle. At least for a bit (!!)  And you’ll have what every research writer wants: clear, unbroken time to sit down and finally make some progress. It's the perfect opportunity to dig into your literature review, to ‘locate your work in the context of your field’ and all that.  “There’s plenty of training for methodology and methods. But for the literature review? Somehow, you’re just supposed to know about that, without much training.”  Excellent! But how will you go about doing that, exactly? You start going through your notes. You’ve got piles of stuff on methodology and methods, pages and pages on analysis, and a whole separate notebook on ethics. But for your literature review? Hmm. There was an assigned chapter from one of the...