How to Write a Literature Review

Every student has to write essays as a part of his school curriculum. By the time, the student reaches high school, along with writing descriptive essays, persuasive writing and narratives, he also has to have the ability to write literature reviews.

A literature review can be done on any subject like science, history or literature. Writing the review does not require the student to do any research. Rather, he has to write based on what he has learned by analyzing and understanding research work that is already done by others.

Here are some tips to help write a literature review:

The first step is to select an already published literature work on a specific subject. You can choose a novel, short story or even an essay. Thereafter, you have to spend time collecting all the research that was done by experts on the subject. It is not necessary that you have to only look at books. You can also make use of the Internet to gather relevant research material. If you are using the Internet as your source for gathering research material, just make sure that the work is reliable.

Before writing the review, read all the research material you have gathered. Make sure you do this thoroughly as you would need all the detailed information on that particular subject. After you feel that you have understood everything, you now put your understanding onto the paper. You review will be a combination of the summary and critical reviews on your chosen subject.

Before writing the review, create an outline. This will allow you to organize and systematically arrange all the information that you have. Once you have the outline, you can start filling in the details. This way you will not stray from the topic.

Your review should start with the thesis statement followed by your introductory paragraph, the main body of your review, which is divided into sub-bodies, and lastly the conclusion.

Therefore, you review will first summarize the knowledge that you have managed to collect from the existing research work, followed by your critical comments and evaluation. This is where you pen down your point of view and what you think. However, you can refer to other reviews to prove your point or explain something, but make sure you add this in the bibliography.

Finally, in your conclusion you tie up all the lose ends and reconnect the thesis statement. This completes the circle, and in the mean time you have developed the skills for critical thinking.

About Author:
Pauline Go is an online leading expert in the book review. She also offers top quality articles like:
Book Review, Rumor Of War

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