6 3 Strategies for Writing a Literature Review

By Kathleen Steeves

While the task of writing a literature review can sometimes seem overwhelming, this chapter provides three strategies you may find useful for getting started or organizing your thoughts further along in the process.

1. Create a Visual Map of the Field of Knowledge Production

Mapping ideas involves visually laying out the geography of a research territory, identifying what has been done and showing how different camps or groups of ideas are connected. Shifting to a visual model of conceptualizing your work can help you see new connections and identify gaps in the literatures.

In exploring your research field, you may benefit from creating a:

• Tree map – identify major topics as branches, and place their subtopics as smaller branches and leaves to show how all are connected.
• Content map – organize a topic field into its hierarchical arrangements and demonstrate how various other topics and subtopics are related to each other.
• “Dinner table” map – imagine your engagement to the field as inviting various ideas to sit at your table for a discussion. Give each a place, and imagine how they interact with each other.

Tip: In making your map, be open to moving categories around, creating new categories and discovering new relationships as your interaction with the literature increases.

2. Read Established Models Intentionally

Read the literature reviews of published books or articles in your field with the intention of modeling your own after the style and syntax of these examples. This strategy can help increase your familiarity with the conventions around writing a literature review in your discipline.

Some questions you may wish to ask yourself as you read with intent include:

• How does the writer position him/herself when it comes to other bodies of work?
• How does he/she demonstrate where they belong?
• How does he/she create a gap to be filled?
• How does he/she acknowledge other scholars?

Consider “syntactic borrowing” – or employing the linguistic patterns you observe in the work of another to frame your own content.  Some sample ‘sentence skeletons’ to work with include:

1. “The study builds on and contributes to work in ___________________”
2. “Although numerous studies (____________) have identified _________________, little analytic attention has been paid to ______________________”
3. “I address the issue by demonstrating ___________________”
4. “The analytic focus on ____________ enables another contribution…”

3. Engage in Text-Work Collaboration

Consider working side by side with your supervisor, or another writing mentor, to actively learn through the process of revising your writing together.  In this model, you present a draft of your work, and tangibly learn how the process of revision works through sitting beside your writing mentor as they guide the editing process.  Consider asking your supervisor for this kind of support, or working one-on-one with a graduate student writing consultant.

Reference:
Kamler, Barbara and Pat Thomson. Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision.
London: Routledge.