Lots of people I know – experienced writers and student writers alike – struggle to write meaningful literature reviews. Many of us don’t seem to be quite sure where we’re going or why we’re going there with a lit review. Many of us, in writing a lit review, have heard questions like the following bouncing around in our brains:
“Am I writing this lit review to prove that I’ve read the things I’m supposed to have read? If that’s the case, couldn’t I just take a quiz, or something?
Or am I just writing a lit review because the sample paper I’m using as a model includes a lit review, so I’ve included one in my paper, too? Am I writing it correctly? I can’t really tell because I don’t really know why I’m writing it. It looks more or less the same as the lit review in the sample paper, but I’m not sure it serves the same purpose?”
Allow me to shed a little light on these questions that have surely plagued us all. I’ll begin by reminding you of last week’s tip, in which I reflected on my own journey from reading like a reader to reading like a writer. As part of that journey, I began to recognize that reading can be much more than a simple one-way transmission of information from author to reader. Reading can be, and indeed ideally is, a conversation between author and reader, no matter how much time and geographic distance may lie between them.
This concept of “conversation” is key not just to reading like a writer but to jumpstarting the writing process. Here’s how the jumpstarting works:
The writer-minded reader reads about something that sounds really cool, like a chatbot that learns from its human interlocutor.
The writer-minded reader wants to know more about chatbots, artificial intelligence, human language learning, and the question of whether or not it’s actually possible for artificial intelligence to “learn” human language at all, let alone from a random human interlocutor.
And so the writer-minded reader starts reading about psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics and language acquisition and language teaching and artificial intelligence and machine learning and maybe a few other topics as well.
Somewhere along the way, the writer-minded reader decides that he or she disagrees with the idea that language can be learned by a machine. The writer-minded raeder feels that no algorithms exist (or can exist) to help a machine navigate the cultural, social, emotional, and creative aspects of language use. The writer-minded reader, by expressing disagreement with scholars who feel that machines can learn human language, has now officially entered into conversation with these scholars.
To strengthen his or her position in the conversation, the writer-minded reader dives back into the research, learning more about language and culture and language use and machine learning and all sorts of things. The research that the writer-minded reader explores is slowly morphing into …. [wait for it]
A literature review.
Yes, that’s right: all of the reading – all of the “conversing with scholars” done by this particular writer-minded reader – turns into a literature review when the writer-minded reader sits down to craft a paper explaining why he or she thinks that artificial intelligence will never be able to “learn” human language.
You see, the literature review serves as a summary of the ongoing conversation between various experts on the topic that interests you, the writer-minded reader. In a way, then, the lit review does simply serve as a way of proving that you’ve read all the things you’re supposed to have read. But instead of taking a quiz to demonstrate your knowledge, you’ll recap that knowledge for the reader of your paper. You’ll use the things you’ve read to bring your reader up to speed with the conversation, helping him or her understand what has been said before, why the things that have been said are important, and how the things that you will say in your writing continue to build upon the existing conversation. You’ll present your knowledge of the conversation in ways that help the reader understand and enter into your own unique perspective on the conversation.
This, my friends, is what we call “framing.” No, not framing as in “making someone else take the blame for a misdeed!” I mean framing as in “presenting your knowlede of the conversation in ways that help the reader understand and enter into your own unique perspective on the conversation.”
Tune in next week for more on framing. In the meantime, rest assured that lit reviews really don’t have to be as intimidating as they often seem. They’re simply a chance for you, the writer-minded reader, to summarize those aspects of an ongoing scholarly conversation that are most important to you, so that you can hop into the conversation with grace, ease, and credibility.
No problem, right?
Happy Reading / Happy Writing,
Dr. Lori
Engaging Texts: Has Your Text Been Engaged? 