Notes taken from Roslynn Azrani M Roslan:
What you need to know about writing literature review that your supervisors and your friends won’t tell you.
Below are the tips for reading articles and books that lead to the process of writing lit review that majority postgraduate students find it such a pain in the a**.
Bear in mind that these tips should not be taken entirely as a major source of reference to your writing journey. Suffice it to say, this is an entirely extracted from my personal and social experiences and some of the tips might be applicable and suitable for you or just merely inapplicable to your needs and learning approach. However, I still argue that this is deemed an invaluable tool for you from a floundering to a flourishing journey of ‘Permanent Head Damage’.
Then I shall call it now Roslynn’s miraculous tip of befriending literature review:
1) First of all make a continuous research in finding suitable research articles and books for your topic.
2) Once you’ve got all the articles and books in hand, read them from the abstract to the conclusion, bearing in mind to look at these critical points in the papers: abstract, methodology, participants, discussion or results of the study, context (place, country, level, age of participants etc).
3) Reading lit review consists of looking at the 3 maps of the paper: theoretical stance (theory /theories used), empirical (evidences, results) and methodological (methods used in the studies). (Except this, I quoted directly from my supervisor, thank you David!)
4) FYI, I still adopt the conventional way of writing my summary/mind map of the article on a blank piece of paper(s). I’ve done this since it’s relatively easy for me to do my freewriting and since I love using coloured pens, thus makes my notes very colourful and easy to read (I love being creative!).
5) Stick to at least 2-3 hours of solid reading the articles/books (meaning no internet, no facebooking, no playing games online :o))
6) Then start summarising your reading in your own words (this is better because it helps to reflect your own understanding of the reading materials you’ve gathered)
7) Start clustering all the articles or books that have the same research genre in terms of topic and methodology.
8) Then start writing about the articles/books you’ve read in a style of freewriting, ignoring all the tenses, grammar and structure of your sentences.
9) Then keep on writing at least a paragraph a day if you can. Once you’ve developed this approach, it is hoped it’ll be easier for you to write flawlessly (I mean continuously, the flow of ideas should be running smoothly now). If you still can’t grapple this skill, knock your head three times on the wall! Hahahaha….Just kidding, please don’t do this since it might damage the grey matters in your brain! You need these grey matters to help your brain works properly and intelligently).
10) Write, write and write.
11) If you have enough of this, stop and have a rest, take a nap for example. A recent research study shows that you can remember
words easily when you sleep after doing your reading. In that study, the participants were found to remember most of the words
they were required to remember before taking a nap compared to the control groups.
12) After taking a beauty sleep, repeat steps 2 to 9.
13) Voila!!! After doing all these steps, to your surprise, you’ll find that you’ve actually written the literature review and of course, once you’ve grasped all these techniques, you’ll find it easier and shall I call it ‘fun’ to do literature review.
14) Good Luck! You don’t need luck to finish your lit review, just merely two factors, 90% of perseverance and 10% of intelligence!
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