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

 My students taught me something the other day. Paraphrasing can mean two different things. There's an easy version, and a hard version and -- you guessed it -- the easy version is what you might be most familiar with, but it is the hard version that you need for your literature review. The easy version is when you take a quote, change some of the key words (perhaps with a trusty thesaurus), maybe alter the sentence structure a bit, and Voila! The quote is now in your own words, you give the author attribution, and you're good to go.   But are you? Notice that in the easy version, you don't really have to fully understand the quote, or how it might or might not be evidence for why your research question needs to be asked. You could even do this by picking a quote at random from any source.  Paraphrasing this way is mostly a surface operation -- you don't have to think very hard about it. And why are you paraphrasing this way? Is it because you feel you have too many...

Now here is a topic that is more interesting than you might at first think. In any literature review, you'll be citing sources and quoting from them so, you pick the most relevant quotes and, well, quote them. What more is there to say? Quite a bit, as it happens.  In some undergraduate work, the purpose is to determine your stance on a text or issue, and then to present evidence for that stance.  That evidence often comes from the literature and in many cases, the task goes like this: you dig in, do loads of reading, find work that supports your stance, pick the clearest or juiciest quotes, and cite them in support of your view.  This work is not without value. You get practice in working out a clear stance, you get experience in searching for scholarly sources, and in reading them. You gain experience in working out how your work fits with previous work. Who agrees with you? Who does not? In order to answer these questions, you have to have a clear and robust sense of y...