Dr Megan Wang (née Kelleher)

Following on from my previous blog post about writing an abstract, I wanted to share more writing tips that may prove useful. Literature reviews are something that are important to include in any piece of writing, but are especially important for thesis writing. If your supervisors are anything like mine, they’ll probably ask you to write a literature review as your first major piece of writing when you start your PhD! But please do not worry about this; see a literature review as a way of planning your argument, rather than a scary piece of writing when you aren’t as familiar with your topic. Here are my tips to help you:

View Your Literature Review as a Reading List

Use the space within your literature review as an opportunity to think about what texts matter to your research. Write it as if you were trying to give recommended reading to someone has never studied the topic – whose works are you interacting with the most, and what writings helped you to gain the context for your own research? Then, write some of the drawbacks to these items and why your own study addresses a gap in previous scholarship.

Be Realistic

Be realistic with your literature review; although everyone would love to read every book, journal article and suchlike on their topic, there simply isn’t the time to do this! When you are first writing your literature review, prioritise the really important texts – don’t forget, you’ll edit this again before you submit your thesis and by that time many other books may have been more influential to your own work.

As you are reading for your literature review, be strategic. Categorise your works into a way that helps you – I personally prefer thematically, but think about what works best for you and your argument. When you are reading, write down three key messages that the text has as though you were summarising it to a friend, and then think about what you agree or disagree with. Finally, consider the gaps in the historiography that you will need to reiterate to explain why your research is important and original.

Boulders, Rocks and Sand

One of the best pieces of advice I received when starting my thesis was the concept of boulders, rocks and sand. This is a tool used to break down your ideas and formulate your literature review effectively. Boulders will be your major texts that are fundamental to your research, rocks are semi-important writings and the sand are the items you read to gain a bit more context but only require a sentence or two of explaining. You only have limited space, so using this idea really helps to enable you to narrow down exactly what matters.

I hope this helps you when writing a literature review! Let me know your thoughts, or if any other hints and tips have helped you. Happy writing!