The 20-Minute Lit Review
By Jeff Zuckerman, Dissertation Specialist and CSS Faculty
Member
At a dissertation intensive earlier this summer, a
student—let’s call him Daniel—asked me to give his literature review a quick
look for APA style and anything else that caught my eye.
“I’ll be glad to go through it,” I said eagerly. I really
was happy to read Daniel’s revision. He had already impressed me with his clear
writing in an earlier draft. Now, after several days of fine-tuning and hard
work, he was ready to show me what he hoped was the final draft.
After skimming the entire literature review in about 20
minutes, I suggested a few places where Daniel could have organized things a
little differently, and I explained a few APA style and punctuation corrections
I had made.
“So that’s it?” Daniel said, a little sadly.
“It read well!” I said. “Those really were the only problems
I saw!”
“In other words,” he said, “I put 3 months into the
literature review, and you just read it in about 20 minutes.”
So much hard work, and here I was with a cheap-sounding
compliment and a dozen or so corrections. As Peggy Lee sang, “Is that all there
is?”
After having read more than a thousand dissertations, I find
that most students get tripped up on later drafts by fewer than a dozen common errors. Those
mistakes jump off the page at me and my fellow form and style editors. And once
you learn to avoid those common problems, chances are your reader will soar
through your work rather quickly.
Then why bother going to so much trouble if your reader is
going to spend less than a half hour on your literature review?
First, this was close to a final draft. Daniel’s chair had
given him a lot of developmental feedback along the way, and in the earlier
draft I had mentioned some areas that needed a bit of a bath to wash off some
confusing passages.
Second, as a Writing Guy I’m reading more for style than for
content. By style I’m referring not
just to APA: I’m also reading for confidence and authority. And Daniel’s
literature review had all the hallmarks of someone who knew what he was talking
about.
The draft was well-organized. It had a point. It told a
story, starting with a great big issue related to the business of education,
narrowed down at the end to a specific research problem that he planned to
address with his research study. It was concise—as an overall package, from paragraph
to paragraph, and from sentence to sentence.
Daniel’s use of references was solid, varied enough that
visually—meaning the number of citations, the freshness of the cited
literature, the scarcity of direct quotes, the attention to APA style details—I
could see the breadth and depth of his knowledge. As the reader, I trusted this
guy knew his stuff.
And those three months of hard work really did pay off. When
Daniel does get to form and style this fall, I’m sure he’s going to pass with
flying colors. The editor who reads his work for the first time will engage
with the text, and he or she will be Daniel’s biggest cheerleader.
Bottom line? It might feel like endless drudgery and
revision in the early going. Follow your committee chair’s guidance. Pay
attention to APA style. Earn your confidence by unveiling your
knowledge of the topic. If you’ve done a good job, your reader might just skim
your work, too, in just 20 minutes.
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