Daniel P. Richards
Volume 6
Chapter Description
If you’re reading this essay, then you most likely have a daunting task ahead of you: writing a literature review.1 Rest assured that you are not alone in your apprehension or lack of excitement at the prospect laid in front of you—most writers feel the same. Parties have never been thrown for a literature review. No champagne bottles have been uncorked in its name. It is likely that your experience in writing literature reviews to this point has been when composing that section of your research paper where all the secondary sources you found belong. You have located the requisite five sources for your teacher and now need to cite and summarize them. You dump them in the boring space of the document that exists after your clever introduction but before your savvy argument. That space might be more than boring; it might be treacherous, a place where all the MLA and APA errors live and where you feel right out of your league in being able to aptly summarize complex scholarship. Yet, rest assured, a literature review remains a vital ingredient in the effectiveness of a given piece of writing, and it might even surprise you that literature reviews serve a critical function in technical and professional workspaces as well. Research does not end once a degree is conferred. A literature review can take many forms and can be found in a wide array of academic, scientific, technical, and workplace documents spanning all fields and disciplines. Sometimes it is the full document; sometimes it is but part of a document. From essays in philosophy to journal articles in oceanography to grant applications in microbiology to proposals in public policy to informal reports in social media marketing to business pitches in accounting, each have a type of literature review component that are connected more by function (what it does) than by form (how it is organized). That is, the form can take many shapes: A literature review can be a threepage section of an academic essay, yes, but it also can be a one paragraph overview of common platforms used by other companies in their social media marketing. It can be a background research section of a grant application for a municipal project. The functions, however, by and large stay the same. The goal of this essay is to examine what these functions are and, in doing so, present the case that a literature review is not supplemental but foundational to any piece of writing—including those in more technical documents. So, actually, you know what? Let’s throw literature reviews a party, after all. And let’s do so by way of an acrostic (a type of verse in which the first letters of each line form a word) of five functions of a literature review, which we’ll address in order, and which end with practical guidance. In terms of its functions, a literature review:
• Participates in a Conversation
• Adjudicates Sources
• Refines for the Target Audience
• Transmutes into Trust
• Yokes You to Others
Literature reviews deserve as much, given their bad rap, indeed their pivotal but thankless role in writing success. And it might make the prospect a little clearer and, dare I say, exciting.
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