Writing Homework Help

Word count at least 650, 2 full pages essay.

Write your literature review.

• A literature review is not an annotated bibliography. A literature review has nothing to do with an annotated bibliography.

• A literature review is not a string of article reports.

• Now that we’ve got that out of the way, pay careful attention to what the study authors do in the early sections of their own essays. After the introduction, each of them will do a literature review. It should resemble what I describe in the next bullet point, but one of the best things you can do is follow the examples in the articles you’re assigned to read.

• A good literature review takes one or more specific ideas and tracks them through how they are developed in several published works.

• Let’s say I assigned you to do a literature review on “faith” in the Bible.

• You might start with Genesis 15:6 and say Abraham was counted righteous because he trusted God.

• You might proceed to Habakkuk 2:4 and note that the righteous one who lives by faith is contrasted to the proud one.

• You might cite several of the accounts of Jesus’ healing miracles from the gospels, where He told people that their faith had made them well, and Matthew 13:58 where He did no miracles because the people had no faith.

• You might then go to Paul’s explanation in Ephesians 2:8-9 that by grace we are saved through faith, and that by God’s gift, and not by our works.

• And you might wind up with James, who said faith without works was dead.

• After you’d found all those references, you would trace the idea of faith through all those locations in the Bible, and more if you found them. Your objective in the writing would be to show how the idea developed, how it proceeded from start through growth to fullness, or how one way of understanding it was the simplest, and subsequent explanations complicated it until it was a complex idea, or that one explanation of it was crude and inaccurate, and subsequent explanations refined it and corrected mistakes until it was reliable. All of those are possibilities.

• But notice, in what I describe, that you would not paraphrase the entire book of Genesis, or the entire Gospel, or the entire book of James. You would focus on what each work said about faith, and only on that.

• Another illustration:

• Imagine you arrive late to a party, and everyone is enjoying a really complicated and heated discussion on a difficult topic. You want to take part, but the conversation is thirty minutes in, and everyone keeps referring to things already said, which leaves you lost.

• A kindhearted person sitting next to you leans over and whispers in your ear, “Well, it started when he said this, and then she said that, and then that guy back over in the corner said this, and then this lady on the couch said this, and now you’re completely up to speed.”

• You, in writing a literature review, are guiding your reader through the way multiple authors have been in conversation with each other over the phenomenon that is the subject of your lit review.

• The kindhearted person by the door wouldn’t tell you each speaker’s entire life story, or their opinions on every subject, but just their contribution to that discussion.

• The most common mistake people make on this assignment is to write a book report on each article, and then string those book reports together and call the result a literature review. That’s not your objective.

Step Four: Edit and submit your literature review.

For guidance on that, see the instructions about the Triple Jump and the errors I’m marking most frequently.

• • Here is a (fake) example of what it should look like when you write about several studies, and apply their findings to one another in the fashion that should happen in a literature review:

“Listening comprehension is a perennial issue in listening scholarship, since it’s one, but not the only, measure of listening effectiveness. Smith (1944) introduced the concept with a study that administered instructions to two different groups of allied soldiers, one of which was allowed to ask questions, while the other group simply listened to the entire presentation. Smith found that listening comprehension was improved by the opportunity to ask questions. Jones (1962) cast doubt on Smith’s findings, with a study that suggested questions disrupted the speaker’s organization and led to less accurate recall over the next forty-eight hours. Brown (1965) adjusted the parameters of Jones’ study by having the speaker present material, then take questions, then take concluding remarks. But Brown cautioned that Smith’s question about listening comprehension wasn’t fully answered by any of the three studies, and that improved measures of retention would need to correct for IQ and culture. Johnson (1968) attempted to replicate Jones’ findings, but introduced the variable of sex, examining organization and recall effects when female speakers spoke to male audiences and vice-versa. Johnson found that same-sex and male to female presentations showed minimal difference, but female to male presentations were less affected by disorganization than by responsiveness. Brown’s allusion to culture may explain some of Johnson’s findings if Tannen’s theory (1992) that women and men operate as two different cultures is correct, but without an experimental condition that includes uninterrupted listening, Smith’s original inquiry into the effect of question and answer in promoting retention is no longer the focus.”

“Smith (1944) did a study that had findings X, Y and Z. Smith concluded that listening was nice.

“Speaking of nice, Jones (1962) finds that listening behaviors result in perceptions that the listener is nice. Jones did a study with this method and these findings, and recommended that people in intimate relationships work on their listening.

“Speaking of people, Brown (1965) studied the ways people listen at work …”