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

Mind maps promise a great deal. Organise your thoughts! Find connections! Make structure fun! And it’s true. It can be fun. We can spend many happy hours putting our ideas into colourful bubble shapes and connecting them with lines.  It feels like progress. But is it? Let’s say you’re doing a study on mindfulness practices and productivity at work. In a typical mind map, the main topic would be in a big circle at the centre, maybe ‘Mindfulness at Work’.  Radiating out from this central point towards the corners and edges of the page would be related themes, each in a smaller circle, such as productivity, stress reduction, organisational culture, focus , and criticisms . And each of these sub-themes would generate even smaller topic bubbles based on what the papers in each cluster tended to cover. Stress reduction, for example, might have bubbles representing papers on burn-out reduction, emotional regulation , and improved moods .  Circles, Lines, and Dead Ends   You...

Drafting: Preparing Preliminary Versions of Whatever It Is You’re Writing  As with most definitions, this tells you what a draft is, but not why it’s important. If you didn’t know anything about drafting and read this definition, you still wouldn’t know much because the important bits are left out, such as what drafting is for and how you go about it.  That’s why this month’s blog is dedicated to the art of intentional drafting and why it matters when you’re writing your literature review.  The Three Phases of Drafting  In what is still one of the best accounts of academic writing I’ve ever read, Roland Huff points out that drafting has three main phases. The first phase is generating , where you just get things down – thoughts, ideas, topics, reading notes, bits of analysis, quotes, questions – it all just gets thrown down on page or screen, in whatever order and without worrying too much about grammar, punctuation or spelling.  The second phase is the much mor...

✍ 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...

As I look back on my writing about writing, I realise there is something I sometimes say without much explanation: we need to know how to listen to our drafts. So in this blog, I am going to tell you a bit more about what I mean by that.  If you are currently working on your literature review, the practical examples I give here may help you develop your own listening process. If you are supporting other researchers with their literature reviews, these insights may help you when it comes to giving feedback, as this technique is useful whether we are listening to our own draft or someone else's.   First, let's quickly review Huff's (1983)* three phases of drafting. Phase 1 is the generative phase, when you get your ideas down on paper in whatever way works for you. This is a relatively unmonitored phase when you actively want to encourage your ideas to tumble out, one after the other. In this phase, you can give your stream of consciousness free reign without worrying about...

It is that time of year again. August has drawn to a close and we are now into September. The shops have their school stationary front and centre – pens of all kinds, piles of printer paper, shiny new notebooks in all manner of designs, just waiting for your brilliant ideas. Ah, yes – the start of the academic year.  If you’re an MA student or a doctoral candidate, these golden days on the cusp of autumn may find you embarking on your dissertation, which typically starts with your literature review. What’s out there on your topic? What do we already know, or think we know? What is the lay of the land in your subject? As the autumn sunshine streams through your window, you’ll be digging into a stack of research articles and filling up one of your shiny new notebooks or its electronic equivalent.  So what do you do with all this material you are collecting – all the findings, all the quotes, all the conclusions, and all the thoughts you have about these things? How do you turn t...

 Well, yes and no. It depends on what you mean by 'model'.  If you were looking for some sort of proforma into which you could just plug your text, that might appeal in the short term but, like most short cuts when it comes to deep and complex writing, it won't be helpful and in the long run it will only waste time. There are at least two reasons why this is:  1) Your literature review is yours. It makes the case for why your research question should be asked. This means that what you find in the literature as you set about building this case will be different to what anyone else finds -- they are researching their topic, not yours. And the argument you eventually construct as you grapple with your review will be based on what you find and, more importantly, what you make of what you find. Since neither of these things is predictable, neither of them can be reduced to any particular, one-size-fits all proforma.  2) Your literature review is not just a 'review'. In ...

 Yes it is. Writing is not easy, especially the kind of high-stakes persuasive writing you need to do in a literature review. For many of us, it can also be scary and this fear can be paralyzing.  The task looms before us – huge, terribly important, but somehow still not started. Instead of sitting down and just digging into the task, we anxiously hurl obstacles at it: But how do I start?! I can’t start if I don’t know how!! I’ve never done anything like this before, so I can’t do it now! This wasn’t really covered in the one session we had on literature reviews! My mind goes blank every time I try to start! Or: I have all these notes, but now what ?? They taught us how to search for articles, but what am I supposed to actually write?!! I have now been staring at this cursor for over an hour! I’ll never finish at this rate! and so on.  Many of us will have similar cascading thoughts when it comes to writing our literature review. I was just about to say there is...

Doing your literature review can be a real slog. Believe me, I know.  I like doing literature reviews and even I think it is a bit of a trudge sometimes.  But if you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that it simply must done -- there are no short cuts. You have to come to grips with the body of work that precedes your research. And that means reading many, many papers in order to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. And, annoyingly, you will have to read papers that in the end turn out to be irrelevant. How else to know if they are relevant or not? Yes, a pain, I grant you.   But can you have fun along the way, too? That is what I dare to suggest in today’s blog.   If you read literature reviews for long enough, you begin to see certain patterns in the way they are structured and written,    For example, many reviews begin, or state somewhere near their start, some version of  There have been many studies of ...