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

✍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 ...

 Some years ago, I was the examiner at a mock viva.  The PhD had many strengths and the student, earnest and hard-working, was very clearly knowledgeable and had a good grasp of methodology and methods.  I was therefore struck by how little analysis there was in the literature review.  I read it several times in advance of the viva, seeking to be generous, but there was no escaping the conclusion: the literature review had not done its job. It was not an argument that established why the research question needed to be asked but a series of randomly ordered encyclopedia entries on topics that related, in greater or lesser degrees, to the student's subject.  My recommendation would be that there was still another 3-6 months of work to do in order to redeem the literature review.  The other reviewer picked up on the same issue, and I have always remembered her comments: Where are you in this literature review? Where is your critical voice?  That got me to...