Some misconceptions about Literature Reviews

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literature review, managing your writing energy, reading

By Cally Guerin

We’ve written about literature reviews before: see, for example, Trust yourself, Demonstrating criticality, and Writing while still uncertain. But there is always something more to say about these sections of the thesis that are so challenging for most doctoral writers. I was reminded again recently of just how big a source of anxiety this can be for novice researchers who feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they feel required to absorb. In the following, I debunk some of the main misconceptions that seem to hobble doctoral writers; in the process, I hope to offer reassurance that the task is more manageable than it can feel at times.

Reading theses to write a thesis

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reading, reading for writing, thesis reader

By Cally Guerin

One of the major challenges of writing a doctoral thesis is that the document submitted for examination doesn’t usually look much like the texts that PhD candidates read. For many students, the first six months or so is spent reading masses of articles, chapters and books, and the focus is on the content of those texts. Then they turn their attention to writing a markedly different genre. Even for those writing a thesis by publication, the document submitted for examination includes sections that do not resemble much of what they have been reading during candidature.