{"id":46757,"date":"2019-02-04T11:54:41","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T19:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=46757"},"modified":"2019-02-04T11:54:41","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T19:54:41","slug":"getting-ready-to-write-about-the-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/getting-ready-to-write-about-the-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting ready to write about \u201cthe literature\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve all heard that the doctorate is about making an original contribution To the literature. Well, that\u2019s right, although what that means is not nearly as scary as it sounds.<\/p>\n

What you may not be told is that doing a PhD is a lot about information management \u2013 finding information, cataloguing it, saving it and retrieving it in order to use it. \u00a0And one major slab of information that you need, in order to say how you contribute, is \u201cthe literature\u201d. Yes think of \u201cthe literature\u201d as a bid wadge of information and it\u2019s not quite so scary.<\/p>\n

Now, there\u2019s a lot to say about \u201cthe literature\u201d \u2013 and you might want to check out\u00a0some of the things that I\u2019ve written before<\/a>\u00a0about literatures work, But here I want to focus on\u00a0using\u00a0<\/em>the literatures. And in particular on the kind of preparation you might do to make yourself ready for using. So a particular kind of information work.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m focusing here on\u00a0preparatory writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Preparatory writing happens before you write the first draft of the literature review. \u00a0I\u2019m assuming that you already have read a lot and entered relevant aspects into some kind of bibliographic software. You will also have made some notes about key points in each text, probably stored in the same software. And you may already have done some mind-mapping about how the various pieces of literature fit together and how they apply to your project. You\u2019ve been managing information.<\/p>\n

So, this here post is just another additional information management strategy that might be useful for you when you are thinking about how to organise the literature-related material you have. In particular I\u2019m focused on how to use literatures to present the case for your research.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s information management strategy is in the form of three questions. Your goal is to write an answer to each question. You should write as concisely as possible.<\/p>\n

But you do need to accumulate the relevant texts for each answer before you start writing. It is crucial in this strategy to add in the references to each answer using your citation programme (Endnote, Zotero, Mendeley etc). Or the old time consuming way with cards or lists if you must.<\/p>\n

Because you need to accumulate information pre-writing, you may not be able to do this exercise by giving yourself a time limit for each answer. But as you don\u2019t want to spend a huge amount of time on each question, you could use a set of timed writing sprints, Pomodoroes, once you have your information, your references together. Or just write each answer\u00a0as quickly as you can.<\/p>\n

So, what are the three questions? Well, here goes.<\/p>\n