Literature Review

My main work this year is writing my masters thesis. This is a piece of original research, and involves a written report of 40,000 words.

(Say it quickly and it won't seem so many!)

As we are coming up to the mid point of the year, you'd think that I might be coming up to word number 20,000 - but no. It doesn't work like that because I have to spend the first 3/4 of the year figuring out what to say, and the last 3 months saying it (at break neck speed, I suppose).

And, in fact, 'the year', only started in February, so I've technically only had 4 months (just over). That's 1/3 of a year. Still, it would be nice to have done 13,000 words at this stage. But still, no, I haven't.

What I have done in the last couple of weeks is start writing my literature review. This should be about 5000-7000 words, and it is basically a sifting and sorting of what everyone else has had to say about my field of enquiry, leading on to why I should be researching this area in the first place.

I've got about 5000 words, which I feel is a good effort so far, and it's not finished yet.

So, how do you write a lit review?

Well, what I have done is read-and-take-notes, read-and-take-notes, etc, for months.
Then read-my-notes, read-my-notes, and,
group-and-sort, group-and-sort.

Finally, take chunks of notes that have been grouped and sorted, and write them up into paragraphs which, hopefully, have some coherence for the (interested!) reader, and (maybe) also bring through some of my opinions on the relevance and quality of the literature.

The trouble is, it's very hard to start writing things. I'm much better at the middle sections than the introductions and so on. So when I go back to look at what I've done, the first bits are a bit discouraging... And I still have some of the hardest bits to write...

(It makes me feel better to know you care!)

Still, I've got a meeting with my supervisor on Wednesday, so at least I've got some proof that I've been busy.

Oh, well. Onwards and upwards.