Literature Review Essentials: A Five-Part Blog Series

Thursday, March 09, 2017 Capstone Writing , Dissertation , Featured , Literature Review , News and Notes , Organization , Prewriting , Scholarly Writing , Writing Process No comments

Are you working on a literature review for your capstone or coursework? Literature reviews can be tricky because they have a slightly different organization, purpose, and audience than other course papers. In this five-part blog series we examine the literature review to help you through the process!

Literature Review Essentials superimposed over Craggy Canyon with Blue Skies

In this series we discuss narrowing down your focus, gathering your ideas/sources, synthesizing your information, and (if you're a capstone writer) aligning your review with your problem statement. For those who may be unfamiliar, a literature review is a paper or section of a work which goes over various sources concerning the paper's topic to provide an overview of pertinent research for the reader. Learn more about literature reviews on the Writing Center's webpages on that topic (writers at the capstone stage can visit our literature review webpage on the Form and Style Review website).

Sound helpful? Check out each of our posts below!

Define Goals—Editor Tara establishes the main goals of a literature review and provides some foundational information on this type of document.

Curate Information—Instructor Nicole discusses why synthesis is important for the literature review and how to curate the information you've compiled.

Identify Themes—Instructor Jes provides an easy-to-use outline for how you can organize your literature review by theme.

Construct Paragraphs—Instructor Jes returns with a sample paragraph from a theme-organized literature review using the MEAL Plan.

Align Problems—Editor and Coordinator of Capstone Resources Lydia offers some insight for capstone writers in aligning their literature review with their problem statement.

With some help from these posts, you will be well on your way to writing a clear, cohesive, and thematically organized literature review! Have some tips and tricks about literature reviews? Feel like sharing which of these posts helped you the most? Tell us below!

The Walden Writing Center provides information and assistance to students with services like live chat, webinars, course visits, paper reviews, podcasts, modules, and the writing center webpages. Through these services they provide students assistance with APA, scholarly writing, and help students gain skills and confidence to enhance their scholarly work.