Top ten tips for writing your Literature Review

1. Recognise your own writing and editing style. Some people are adept at banging down a first
draft quite quickly but then need to edit and revise the text a number of times. Others work
more slowly but can produce a final draft with fewer iterations. There are ‘lucky’ (work fast
and don’t need to revise) and ‘unlucky’ (work slowly and need to revise many times) versions
of these variants. Make sure you know what sort of writer you are, and build in enough time
to do a proper job.
2. Try to make your choices visible; that is, state and justify them. This applies particularly to
choices about your themes, about your criteria for choosing papers, etc. Readers find things
much easier to criticise if you haven’t told them why you have done something, and much
harder when you have. Above all, try to recognise when your reader might quibble about or
object to something, and turn their objection off before it occurs to them. This is why the
introduction is so important, as is signalling and signposting throughout the review. In other
words, always keep your reader in mind while writing!
3. Use consistent heading/sub-heading formats and signpost properly. At any point the reader
should know exactly where she is in the review. You should NEVER put the reader in the
position where she won’t know what she will find when she turns the page.
4. Each paragraph should have a function and the content/topic of any paragraph should be
able to be captured in a word or phrase. If the paragraph is about two or more topics, or you
can’t summarise it in this way, reorganise/divide it. Never write single sentence paragraphs.
5. Make sure you show the relations between different studies, and don’t just list the findings
of those studies (i.e. analyse, don’t just describe). There are four kinds of relationship between
papers (in each case, the date of paper A is later than the date of paper B – you can’t have a
2010 paper ‘agreeing’ with a 2015 paper!):
a) Paper A agrees with/supports the findings/argument of Paper B
b) Paper A disagrees with/contradicts the findings/argument of Paper B
c) Paper A amends (partly agrees, partly disagrees with) the findings/argument of Paper B
d) Paper A develops (agrees with and adds to) the findings/argument of Paper B
6. Vary your way of citing sources within the text. There are two main styles for writing a
sentence containing a citation. Where the names of the authors play an active part in the
sentence, brackets go around date only. However, where the names play a passive part, the
brackets enclose the whole reference. The first is something like, “Smith (2005) argues that
potatoes taste better than tomatoes”. The second looks like, “Potatoes taste better than
tomatoes (Smith, 2005)”. Varying between these formats adds interest to your writing and
engages the reader. The second style is generally preferable as the opening sentence to a
paragraph, as it more clearly establishes the topic of the paragraph (see 4 above).
7. Resist the temptation to write as if you have just swallowed a thesaurus. Authors state,
write, find, conclude, argue. They don’t adumbrate, formulate, hypothecate, prognosticate,
etc.
8. Referencing is the major element of presentation, for which a whopping 20 marks are
available.
9. Edit and proofread your work. There are a number of ways to become effective at
proofreading. One is simply to change the colour or appearance of the text in draft, meaning
your eyes will see things they had become de-sensitised to. More time-consuming but more
effective is to read a passage aloud to yourself, in the process paying close attention to
punctuation, sentence length and structure.
10. Treat your sources with respect and do not plagiarise them. Always quote properly (use “”
marks, and give page numbers). Do not negatively criticise individual sources: we want your
evaluation of the literature as a whole, or of groups of sources/schools of thought within it.