Taking
hundreds of notes, slipping sticky notes into books to tag pages, highlighting
important quotes on an online document— these are all ways to organize your
sources and their arguments. But what’s a better way to start understanding how
your sources can be used?
Well,
one way is to write a literature review.
A
literature review allows you to summarize your sources, compare them to other
sources, and decide how they will be used in your final research paper— if they
will be. It helps you to establish a background for your paper, although it can
be a little difficult to understand how to begin to write one.
Speaking
from experience, I’ve always had trouble finding a way to best present and articulate
my information. I researched it all, I knew what I was talking about, but I
found it difficult to organize a way in which it all fit together nicely so that
my jumbled notes would make sense to others.
So, what’s the best way to start?
Make
an outline. This is good advice for any essay or paper or report. An outline
gives you a basis from where to start and can help you organize your notes and
thoughts. It can also help you to organize your sources in a way that helps
them flow. Then, decide which sources fit into the certain categories/sections
on your outline, and from there add your notes.
Also,
as a final tip, when you begin to write your literature review, you don’t need
to strictly stick to the outline. If you find something that works better as
you are writing, then use it. Don’t be afraid to change your outline over and
over again; sometimes reorganizing your thoughts helps you to write better than
before.
Agreed. I really do love outlines. They're at least half the work; all you have to do when you're done is convert the outline into essay format. I hate it when people I talk to say "Nah, I don't have time to write an outline." Wrong! In almost every situation, you will end up saving so much time and pain if you write an outline first. I would have been doomed had I not written an outline for my Literature Review Assignment. Just printing out a bunch of articles and highlighting stuff isn't enough. The Literature Review Assignment is kind of an outline for our final research paper itself, so as much as I hated writing it, it feels great that I have an action plan of sorts. Pretty much all we need to do now is take the Lit Review and frame an argument around it (if I'm understanding the assignment correctly). The same goes for these blogs—we're collecting, reading, and analyzing one scholarly source at a time, so as a whole, we could say that the blogs work as an outline for our research paper.
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