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| Tackling a Thesis | |
Part Four: Writing the Literature Review |
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| Once you have your sources gathered (if you need help doing this, see Part Three of Tackling a Thesis), you will have to write a literature review. The purpose of this review is to investigate the various critical approaches to your topic and establish the background for your own contribution to body of knowledge. | |
| 1. Understand why a literature review is important. | |
| A literature review is not a research paper. You do research, and you put it together in a coherent, logical fashion to help make a point, but a literature review is more than that. Your literature review exists to show other readers how you incorporate the work of others into your own work, and how your work fits into the established research and/or theories in the field. Basically, the literature review helps to explain how, where, and why your research fits into the bigger picture. If your thesis doesn’t look like it’s going to contribute to the body of research as a whole (for your topic, anyway), you might want to rethink it, or at least modify it. The literature review should be underway (although not necessarily complete) long before you get to the “point of no return” (when you start doing your experiment or final project). | |
| 2. Read your material. | |
| This can be time-consuming, but it is important that you read everything you have gathered. If you don’t understand some of it, that’s all right, because if you read all of your sources, what you may not understand in one source may be explained in another. The point, however, is that you must, at least in some way, understand the work of others in your field, or else you will not be able to tell if your research (and experiment, if you do one) will contribute to the greater body of work. | |
| 3. Number your sources. | |
| Citation formats are very detailed, and once you’ve begun the writing process, there is no reason to stop writing just to figure out a citation format. Instead, when you’re writing, use the number of the source and the page number your citation comes from; place it in parentheses right after you finish using the source and come back to it later. | |
| 4. Make an outline. | |
| Outlines, admittedly, don’t work for everyone. But you don’t have to have a “formal” outline (see Box 1). You could be as formal or as informal as you like (see Box 2). Outlines are suggested here because, with this large amount of information, clear organization is essential. By the time you’ve reached this step, you should have a good idea of the points you’ll be covering in your literature review, and how they relate to your sources and your topic. | |
Box 1: Formal Outline |
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Box 2: Informal Outline |
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| 5. Determine where your sources would be best placed in your outline. |
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| You can do this in several ways. There should be some sort of organization within each section, as well; some organizational heuristics are opposition/support, chronological, least to most important, etc. You can put numbers next to points in your outline, you can label your source materials with Post-It™ notes, or you can choose your own method. Note that “sources” means items in your literature review. | |
| 6. Sit down and start writing. | |
This part is really one of the hardest for several reasons. The sheer scope of a literature review can be so broad that breaking it down into manageable parts often seems difficult. That’s why outlines (or other organizational heuristics) are important. Also, some people have trouble starting papers. If this turns out to be the case, skip the introduction and write it later. After all, the introduction of a literature review is usually just an overview of what you’re going to say. One good strategy in the writing of the literature review is to write it in sections. Even if you don’t keep those sections in your final draft, there is nothing wrong with writing three or four separate five-to-ten-paragraph essays, each of them with a separate critical focus. This makes the literature review more manageable; it may be easier to set a personal goal of writing one of these mini-essays per week, rather than writing an entire literature review in a month. Strong literature reviews move in logical, sensible patterns. Once again, this is why outlines are useful and important. Note that you can change the order of your outline, should you discover a more logical way to present your information. |
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| 7. Don’t proofread until later. | |
| This is the quickest way to lose your train of thought. You will have numerous opportunities to proofread your work as you move through the process of revision and editing. Expect to revise several times, and don’t get discouraged when instructed to do so by your advisor. All good writers revise many times. | |
| 8. Print and save everything several times. | |
| Computers, while being useful in their place, are still prone to destroy files and corrupt without provocation. Save everything twice on your hard drive, and on two separate disks; one as a “work” disk, and the other solely as “backup.” Back up your saved files once a week; do it the same time every week (after church, after a certain class, etc.) so you don’t forget. Also, print everything twice. The school allows free unlimited printing in the computer labs; take advantage of this. Then keep all of your material in a folder, organized and safe, with one copy stashed somewhere at home for emergency safekeeping. It seems redundant, but you’d be surprised how many people come to the UWC for help, try to print something, and find it gone. | |
A Final Note… |
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| Part 1: Picking a Topic and Advisor | |
| Part 2: The Timeline | |
| Part 3: Reading and Research | |
| Part 4: Writing the Literature Review | |
| Part 5: Writing the Thesis | |
| Part 6: Making sure you've completed all required sections of your thesis | |