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Walden University Writing Center

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Thursday Thoughts: Live Webinars in March

Thursday, February 28, 2019 , , , , , , , No comments
Can you believe it’s March already? How is your progress on your New Year’s writing goals?
Whether you did or didn’t set any writing goals for yourself this year, why not plan to work on your writing now by joining us for some of our live webinars in March!
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Improving Your Writing: Strategies for Revising, Proofing, and Using Feedback
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
8:00p.m.-9:00 p.m. (Eastern)
This webinar will discuss the revision process in all its forms, including explaining the difference between proofreading and revising, how to revise on your own, how to revise using Writing Center or peer feedback, and how to revise using faculty feedback.

 APA Citations Part 2: Nontraditional Sources
Thursday, March 14, 2019
12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. (Eastern)
In this second of two APA sessions, Writing Center staff members will discuss nontraditional APA citations and reference entries, with an emphasis on those that are common to Walden assignments. We will provide guidance on citing discussion posts, course videos, and other sources that are required at Walden but not explored thoroughly in the APA manual. Participants will receive links and other tools for helping students master these formats.

 Reviewing the Literature and Incorporating Previous Research
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern)
This session will focus on writing approaches to synthesizing the research, including strategies to help organize and evaluate your sources, particularly in the literature review of doctoral capstone studies.

Practical Writing Skills: Using & Integrating Quotes
Thursday, March 21, 2019
7:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m. (Eastern)
Learn the best way to use and integrate quotes in your academic writing in this interactive webinar. In the first half of this webinar you'll learn the basic principles for incorporating quotes into your writing, and then in the second half you'll practice integrating quotes so you can master this writing skill.

Mastering the Mechanics Part 2: Compound & Complex Sentences
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. (Eastern)
The second webinar in the Mastering the Mechanics series focuses on writing compound and complex sentences, with an emphasis on using correct punctuation, identifying common errors, and practicing skills. This webinar will support students in composing varied, sophisticated, and grammatically correct sentences.


 If you are unable to attend any of these sessions in person, we post recordings of every live webinar event on the Walden University Writing Center website. The recordings of these sessions are posted 24 hours after they take place, and you can watch them free and on-demand. 

The Walden University Writing Center creates content to help students with a range of topics related to scholarly writing, APA style, and the writing process. We host webinars, and offer paper reviews, live chat, and a podcast.



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Thursday Thoughts: Capstone Resources

Thursday, May 25, 2017 , , , , , , , , , , , No comments
The Writing Center works with Walden University writers to provide resources for different points in the academic writing process. Instructors work with students during their coursework and up through the doctoral prospectus, while editors connect with students from the proposal stage through the completion of their doctoral project. In addition to our web resources webinars, and one-to-one services, we provide blog posts, podcasts, and other resources that may help students with capstone development. 

Capstone Resources!

Below is a curated list of resources, by category, that may be helpful to students as they write the capstone.
On Getting Started and Sustaining Productivity:
Preproposal Starter Kit
Proposal Starter Kit
Five Things to Know Before Beginning Your Capstone Study
Capstone Calendars
Starting Your Dissertation
Time Management
Expert Advice on Starting Your Proposal
Interpreting Your Capstone Rubric
Planning Your Proposal and IRB Resources
Revising:
Introduction to the Form and Style Review
Revising Your Capstone
Revision and Self-Editing Skills
 
Research and Resources:
Podcast Episode on The Literature Review Matrix
Literature Review Essentials Blog Series
In-text citations in your dissertation
Selecting Appropriate Capstone Sources
Avoiding Bias in Your Capstone
How to Discuss Findings

Specific Sections/Documents in the Capstone
Summary, Transition, and Previews in Capstone Writing
Remembering Your Reader in the Methods Section
Problem Statements
The Walden Writing Center provides information and assistance to students with services like live chat, webinars, course visits, paper reviews, podcasts, modules, and 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.
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WriteCast Episode 38: The Literature Review Matrix: What it is, How to Use it, and How to Make it Work for You

Thursday, May 11, 2017 , , , , , , , , , , 2 comments
Have you heard of the literature review matrix? It's a tool you'll want to know about if you're working on, or going to be working on, any major research and writing project. If you are familiar with the matrix but aren't yet sure how to use it or haven't found it helpful, then this episode is for you, too. Brittany shares why she loves the matrix as a researching, writing, and teaching tool, and Beth explains why she was hesitant about the matrix at first but how students can tailor it to meet their own research needs.

 The Literature Review Matrix resource, the focus of this episode, is available in Word and PDF form on our website!

 Click on the player below to listen to the full episode now. To download the episode, click the share button on the player, then click the download button. If you'd like a transcript of today's episode, or to access our episode archive, head over to our WriteCast: A Casual Conversation for Serious Writers homepage. Happy Listening!

author
The WriteCast podcast is produced by Anne Shiell and the staff of the Walden University Writing Center and delves into a different writing issue in each episode. In line with the mission of the Writing Center, WriteCast provides multi-modal, on demand writing instruction that enhances students' writing skill and ease. We hope you enjoy this episode and comment in the box below.


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May Webinar Update

Thursday, April 27, 2017 , , , , , , , , , , No comments
Happy nearly May, Walden students! We hope the flowers are blooming where you live! This month we have a range of webinars, including a brand new offering on plagiarism prevention.

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Every webinar presents students with a live, interactive setting where you can ask questions of writing center staff, work on practice exercises and questions, and develop a better understanding of the topic being presented. This month, our topics range from literature reviews and reference lists to grammar and thesis statements. We also have a brand new webinar on Plagiarism Prevention that will help you avoid plagiarism in your work! Check out our schedule below. All times listed in EST.
You can click these links to register for the webinar ahead of time! If you can’t attend live, don’t worry—you can check out our entire Webinar Recording Library here.
If you have any questions about our webinar schedule or appointment scheduling system, e-mail us at writingsupport@waldenu.edu. We hope to see you there!
 
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.
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Literature Review Essentials: Align Problems

Monday, March 27, 2017 , , , , 6 comments
Writing an effective review of literature is a necessary step if you are writing a doctoral study or dissertation. It can feel overwhelming, though; it’s almost like doing a research project within a research project, where you devise a strategy, gather evidence (in this case, relevant literature), and then analyze and organize it to present to your reader. Therefore, like all elements of a major research undertaking, planning ahead is key! I’d like to share a strategy today that can help you use the key words in your problem statement to build a preliminary outline for your literature review and can make the drafting process go much, much faster.

Title Image for this blog post: a canyon with blue sky above

Start Planning Your Draft Long Before You’re Ready to Start Writing
One problem researchers can face when writing the literature review is not knowing how to get started. There’s a lot of literature out there, and you will have a lot of articles and notes you will want to cover. Using key words from your problem statement to get you started can keep your literature review on track and help you focus in on what’s most relevant to your individual study without getting too impossibly broad.

To help you with this, the Walden Library has lots of good resources for doctoral students writing their literature review, even specific information on doing research for a literature review. The library also has specific instructions for generating key search terms based on your topic, and using your problem statement to generate a preliminary outline for your literature review follows the same principle, except in reverse.

Make it Easy on Your Reader, and On Yourself
You don’t have to invent new headings for your literature review out of thin air—they should already be embedded in the introduction to your study. When you sat down to generate key words to search in library databases, you took the key words in your study and brainstormed as many options as you could to conduct and exhaustive search. Now, when you are sitting down to write, look at your problem statement again. These are the main ideas your reader is going to latch onto and look for throughout your document.

Circle or highlight the major words and concepts in your problem statement—there may be some repetition, but that’s OK. Once you have a list, instead of generating more examples, see if you can boil it down to a handful of key concepts. Then, organize those concepts and subconcepts into an outline, and voila! Now you’ve broken down your literature review into smaller sections that each cover a key part of research on your topic. Plus, these are the main ideas and concepts your reader will already be looking for, so they’ll be already familiar.

The Table of Contents Test
If you look through a sampling of strong dissertations, you will start to notice how closely the well-organized and synthesized literature reviews correlate to the problem statement.

Here’s just one example. In the following image, the main words in the problem statement are highlighted: 
A Sample Problem Statement with Key Terms Highlighted
A Sample Problem Statement with Key Terms Highlighted

Now, if you look at the headings in this author’s Table of Contents, you can see how much the information in the chapter headings matches the information in the problem statement:

Dissertation Table of Contents Containing the Highlighted Terms from the Problem Statement
Dissertation Table of Contents Containing the Highlighted Terms from the Problem Statement

Instead of organizing the literature review chronologically, or by author, she stuck with the main ideas in her problem statement, then filled in the sections and subheadings based on the research she found. If you do this in your own writing, it will give you a head start on a well-synthesized, clearly organized literature review that stays focused and provides strong support for the kind of original research you want to do.

In Conclusion
Instead of looking at the mound of extant literature you found and building a literature review from scratch, use your problem statement to get you started with your major categories and subheadings. You might eventually want to reorganize and add or subtract headings as you write and make revisions, but this strategy will start you off in the right direction. You want your literature review to support the new work you want to contribute as a scholar, and what better way to do that than by using your own words!





Lydia Lunning is a Dissertation Editor and the Writing Center's Coordinator for Capstone Services. She earned degrees from Oberlin College and the University of Minnesota, and served on the editorial staff of Cricket Magazine Group.


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Literature Review Essentials: Construct Paragraphs

Monday, March 20, 2017 , , , 6 comments
One of the topics our Writing Instructors and Dissertation Editors frequently discuss with students in paper reviews and form and style reviews is the MEAL plan. MEAL stands for the following: Main idea, Evidence, Analysis, and Lead out. The MEAL Plan is a way to remember the basic components and structure of an academic body paragraph, and we often suggest using this paragraphing strategy when writing documents such as course papers and discussion posts.

While this strategy is quite useful for writing these common coursework assignments, did you know that it’s also useful for writing literature review body paragraphs?

Title Image with canyons and vegetation

When you write your thematically organized literature review body paragraphs, one way to do this is by using the MEAL plan. Paragraphs that follow the MEAL plan have four main parts: (1) the topic sentence which states the main idea of the paragraph in the author’s own words, (2) relevant evidence which is paraphrased or quoted and also cited, (3) analysis of that evidence, threaded throughout the paragraph as needed, and (4) a conclusion sentence which offers synthesis and wraps up the paragraph, written in the author’s own words.

Here is an adaptable outline of what this might look like for a literature review body paragraph:

  • Main idea: A topic sentence which tells the reader the theme that arose in the literature.
  • Evidence: Paraphrased and cited information from a source in the literature which tells the reader important information related to the theme. 
  • Analysis: The writer’s interpretation and analysis of the paraphrased information which can be used to explain the evidence and link ideas.
  • Repeat evidence and analysis as needed: In a literature review, there will almost always be several pieces of evidence paraphrased from different sources with analysis threaded throughout as needed.
  • Lead out: A conclusion sentence which synthesizes what all of this literature has to say about this theme and concludes the paragraph.

One thing to emphasize with this outline is that the evidence and analysis can be repeated as many times as necessary in order to convey relevant information from the literature and analyze that information. This means that each paragraph will likely have a different amount of evidence and analysis, depending on how many sources had information to contribute to the overall theme. Some paragraphs may be short with just 2 pieces of evidence, and some may be longer with 4 or 5 pieces of evidence contributing to the theme. So, while this method offers an overall structure, it’s also flexible and adaptable.

Putting this into practice, here’s what this might look like for a paragraph in a literature review about the benefits of apartment living:

[Main idea]: Apartments are better than single family homes for young couples because of the community that is available. [Evidence from source 1]: As Basye (2015) explained, young couples living on their own benefit from relationships with multi-generational neighbors and friends. [Evidence from source 2]: In addition, as Bono and Matluba (2016) argued, young couples often do not yet have secure social networks, so living in an apartment as compared to a home offers the opportunity to meet people nearby and create social networks close to home. [Analysis]: Thus, apartment living can be beneficial for relationship building. [Evidence from source 3]: Furthermore, having neighbors offers a safety network because when individuals form communities and social bonds, they are more likely to look out for one another (Hendron, 2017).  [Lead out]: Overall, the literature showed that apartments are beneficial for young couples because of the relationships they can form, the networks they can create, and increased safety.

When organizing a literature review thematically, using this MEAL plan approach can help to ensure that the theme addressed in the paragraph is clear, the evidence is organized, and analysis and concluding thoughts are included. As you write your literature review body paragraphs then, use this MEAL plan approach to (1) make it clear what themes arose in the literature, (2) paraphrase relevant source information for the reader, (3) analyze and synthesize the information that you paraphrase, and (4) conclude and wrap up your ideas.

If you’d like to learn more about the MEAL plan, you can also watch our webinar on Writing Effective Academic Paragraphs. If you’d like to learn more about literature reviews, you can watch our webinar on Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography Basics.


We hope you’ll try this method of applying the MEAL plan strategy to your next literature review, and let us know how it goes in the comments!



Jes Philbrook is a Writing Instructor and the Coordinator of Doctoral Writing Assessment in the Walden University Writing Center. Jes has been helping graduate students write literature reviews for the last seven years, since she started working with nursing students who frequently were assigned literature review assignments. In her free time, Jes likes to take walks around lakes, plan trips and adventures, and cook delicious and wholesome food.


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Literature Review Essentials: Identify Themes

Monday, March 13, 2017 , , 26 comments
Academic and scholarly writers often find themselves in situations where they must write literature reviews. This genre of writing is useful for academic writers because it provides an opportunity to demonstrate what research has already shown or what gaps exist in the literature. Literature reviews are also often the starting point of demonstrating how your research fits into a larger body of work. At the capstone stage, writers at Walden compose literature reviews, but more and more, students in coursework are writing these kinds of documents too.

Over the last year, I’ve had several students write in to our chat or paper review services asking for help figuring out how to organize literature review body paragraphs. So today, let’s discuss how to organize and outline a literature review thematically.

Title Slide: Canyons and Blue Sky

Literature Reviews vs. Annotations or Summaries

Literature reviews should be organized thematically because the purpose is to show, overall, what the literature has demonstrated. The goal is not to give the reader a summary of each article. That’s what an annotated bibliography is: a series of summaries and analyses of sources, one listed after the other. With an annotated bibliography, readers are looking to have these questions answered: What is each source about, what’s the criticism of each source, and how is each source applicable? An annotated bibliography takes each source one by one and engages with one source per paragraph.

In contrast, the literature review is different since it’s not actually the sources that matter; instead, it’s the synthesis that matters. Readers, when going through a literature review, are looking to have these questions answered: In this body of literature, what were the main themes that arose, and what do these sources say about these themes? How do these sources overlap, and where are there gaps in the literature? A literature review synthesizes the ideas in sources and engages with several sources per paragraph.

So, the first step to writing a thematic literature review is to be sure you’re actually writing a literature review and not an annotated bibliography.

Planning and Outlining to Organize Thematically

In order to write a literature review, writers must do a lot of planning. Without proper planning, it will be hard to determine what the major themes are that have arisen in the literature, and the review might become disorganized and require significant revision. So, to help you stay on track, here’s a method for how you can approach your literature review at the planning stage:

1. As you begin to read your sources, do some critical reading to decipher: What are the major themes and ideas that you are seeing in the literature related to your topic? Take notes as you read, perhaps by highlighting sources with various colors based on emerging themes, or by making notes in the margins, or by writing down themes you’re seeing in a notebook. Try a few methods and then use what works for you.

 2. Once you’re noticing a few themes, start to create an outline, organized by theme, where you have the theme at the top and then list out each source that had something to do with that theme. Ideally, you’ll eventually have several themes in your outline with several sources below each theme. This will help you structure and organize by themes and plan body paragraphs. Here’s how this might look:

Theme 1: Name or description of theme, which will eventually be made into a topic sentence
  • Author Name (Year), Paraphrase of relevant material related to the theme
  • Repeat as needed for all the sources you’ve found that deal with this theme
Theme 2: Name or description of theme, which will eventually be made into a topic sentence
  • Author Name (Year), Paraphrase of relevant material related to the theme
  • Author Name (Year), Paraphrase of relevant material related to the theme
  • Repeat as needed for all the sources you’ve found that deal with this theme
Continue as needed, depending on how many themes you have identified in the literature and how many sources have information to contribute to the themes.

3. Continue to read through your sources to (1) identify themes in the literature and (2) identify which sources have information and ideas that contribute to those themes. You may need to re-read sources to catch things missed in the first read, and as you read and re-read, your outline will continue to grow. Note too that it’s okay if a source is listed in the outline many times. Sources will naturally address many themes, so it is expected that a source will appear a few times throughout a literature review, particularly if the source is complex and covers many relevant topics.

Once you have gone through these steps to sift through your research, determine the themes, figure out which sources relate to which themes, and create your outline for your literature review body paragraphs, you have a solid foundation for the drafting of your thematic literature review. From here, you can start to draft body paragraphs and sections that address various themes in the literature.

 Give this strategy for outlining thematic literature reviews a try, and let us know how it works for you in the comments section of this post. We look forward to hearing your stories!



 Jes Philbrook is a Writing Instructor and the Coordinator of Doctoral Writing Assessment in the Walden University Writing Center. Jes has been helping graduate students write literature reviews for the last seven years, since she started working with nursing students who frequently were assigned literature review assignments. In her free time, Jes likes to take walks around lakes, plan trips and adventures, and cook delicious and wholesome food.


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