-

 




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

But Does My Literature Review Sound Clever Enough?

-
Image
✍This is a common worry, and a particularly pernicious one. You’ve just got absorbed into your work, you’re feeling motivated, you’ve started noticing interesting connections between sources, and then 💥BAM!💥 Am I doing it right? All the papers I read sound so clever! I don’t sound like that! How can I ever establish myself as an expert with this mess?!  Fear and doubt rear their ugly heads and then paralysis sets in. You’d set aside the whole morning to get some real work done, but now? Impossible. Your pen falters on the page and it feels like there's a weight crushing down on you. 🤫 I’m going to let you in on a secret.  All those papers you are reading 📚 -- the ones that sound so clever, the ones by the biggest and most established names in your field -- they all began as sloppy, messy drafts, every single one of them. And that is because drafts are supposed to be sloppy and messy. That’s their job.  ➡️ No one’s draft sounds clever.  That’s all very well for a ...
Read more

Can I Use Blog Posts in My Literature Review?

-
Image
 Ah – now that’s an interesting question 🤔.  Usually, the answer is something like this:  ‼️ NO, absolutely NOT, blog posts can be written by anyone on anything and are NOT reliable sources. They are NOT the research literature. DON’T go there‼️ Generally, this is good advice. Blog posts can indeed be written by anyone on anything, they do not generally go through any rigorous process of quality control before they are published, and they may or may not be reliable. As the author of a post, you sit down, write your piece, do such revision and editing as you think necessary, press publish , and there you go – your post is up. Your views, opinions, thoughts, and insights are in the world.  These may be all well and good, but they are not research findings.  To access these, you need to go where those findings are – to articles in academic journals, essays in edited collections, and scholarly books. These have gone through peer review before publication: experts i...
Read more

What Kind of Writer Are You?

-
Image
✍ In this blog, I typically focus on writing dissertation literature reviews. In today’s blog, however, I want to shift gears ⚙️ a bit and focus on you -- the dissertation literature review writer.   What kind of writer are you?  Whoa there , you might be thinking. Writers have ‘kinds’?   Yes, it’s true – we don’t all write the same way. 🫨 🟣 Some people, as Sky Marsen outlines in her excellent book Professional Writing* , are bottom-up writers. We start by generating ideas, collecting information, and gathering data. This results in a massive pile of stuff 📚, which we then sift, sort, evaluate and eventually structure once we figure out our argument -- what we think all this stuff is ultimately saying. We are the types who tend to write the outline last.  🟣 Other people are top-down writers. Top-down writers generate the outline of what they're writing first📋, and then attack their pile of stuff, slotting in the ideas, information, and data they've collected wit...
Read more