What is a Review of the Literature?
Imagine yourself having come from a meeting in which a complex debate took place. You want to tell a group of friends about the meeting, and to do so you need to describe the conversation. You will explain the important ideas that got covered, who made various points, and why they made them. When you’re finished, your friends will have a good sense of how the conversation went, and they’ll feel able to jump into the same discussion and make their own points. This is exactly what reviews of literature do. They appear, in one form or another, in virtually every academic article, recounting what has already been said in the conversation as well as what has been left out of the conversation, so that readers can understand where the writer is going to jump in. Lit reviews describe what is considered known and unknown about a given issue. They synthesize the arguments that have already taken place, and create a space or a “niche” for the current writer to make her argument by demonstrating that no one has made it and why it needs to be made to carry on the conversation. A review of the literature is a step up in complexity from the annotated bib. The annotated bib separately summarized each source. The review of the literature is a synthesis of those sources, comparing and contrasting relevant points. An important distinction between the annotated bib and the lit review is that annotations are arranged by *author* whereas the lit review is arranged by *points.* Thus, the lit review will explain what is known about important aspects of your topic, focusing mainly on points rather than researchers. For example a main sentence in a lit review would put emphasis on the topic this way: —Rhetorical reading is an important skill for college-level students (Flower; Haas; Jones). Separate sources use a semicolon, not a comma for the in-text citations. Note that the researchers’ names generally come last, while the main point is stressed first. After this sentence you might briefly describe the studies undertaken by these three authors and explain how the studies found similar or different things, but the focus should be on the main point that all three share—or on a point about which they disagree. At the end of the review of the literature, you will need to establish a niche for your own proposed research, AKA move 2 of CARS. Here is where you say, “That is what we know about topic X. What we don’t know is…” You can establish a niche for yourself in four ways: counter-claiming (“Jones says X is true, but I disagree”), indicating a gap (“We know about X, but we do not know about Y), question-raising (“We know X is true, but why is it true?”), or continuing a tradition (“Jones and Smith did excellent work and I would like to build on it by…”). This will be your research question, and the next part of the paper will discuss what your primary research proposal is, beginning with methods. I have attached the reference page for the sources along with my introduction.\