{"id":69797,"date":"2023-09-14T00:11:38","date_gmt":"2023-09-14T04:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=69797"},"modified":"2023-09-14T00:11:38","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T04:11:38","slug":"can-you-write-too-much-about-literatures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/can-you-write-too-much-about-literatures\/","title":{"rendered":"Can you write too much about literatures?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yes, yes, yes. Too much literatures is a Real Thing.<\/p>\n

Of course you have to write with, from and about literatures. You need to situate your work in a specific field, showing what texts you are drawing on and what you will contribute to the field.<\/p>\n

In other words, you use literatures as the building blocks for your own research \u2013 you don\u2019t have to start from scratch. You use literatures to work out what meaning you will make of specific terms. You use literatures to find the appropriate conceptual framing for your research design and\/or to make sense of the data you\u2019ve generated.<\/p>\n

So you have to\u00a0read widely\u00a0<\/strong>to work out what\u2019s relevant to your work. You don\u2019t know straight away. You scope what literatures are out there. You get a general sense of the history of the field, its key players. And you narrow down your search and reading to find the work that will specifically inform your own study.<\/p>\n

It might be helpful to think of doing literatures work as going to the library. First of all, you have to locate the right row(s) of books. After a general recce to see what\u2019s there \u2013 and this might mean picking up several books and reading a bit to gauge their usefulness \u2013 you home in on the particular shelves that refer specifically to your topic. And you read this set of books pretty thoroughly.<\/p>\n

But some of this set of books may be surplus to requirements. But you don\u2019t know that, or which, till you\u2019ve read them. Some might duplicate an argument. Or take a line that you decide, once you\u2019ve read a lot, that you don\u2019t need or don\u2019t agree with.<\/p>\n

So you already know what this practice means. You very often read a lot more than you actually use. In fact, every time you start on a new topic, you have to educate yourself about the broad area first in order to pick out what is relevant to your particular study.<\/p>\n

But this post is about the writing work that follows.<\/p>\n

Writing too much about literatures is almost always because writers have not made enough hard choices. They think that just because they\u2019ve read shelves worth, every single text needs to go in. They need to empty their bibliographic data base onto the page, into a chapter. And so they need to write something about everything.<\/p>\n

Nooooooo. Enter the too long literatures chapter or section.<\/p>\n

Too long literatures chapters and sections are deadly dull. And they gobble up words that could be more usefully spent on your own work. Writing about literatures is about putting SOME things in, and omitting or removing OTHER things. Your job is not to tell your reader everything there is to know about x or y.\u00a0You only have to tell your reader about the literatures relevant to your research<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

To repeat. Dealing with literatures means you get to make a judicious selection from all of the possible texts. You have to choose what is most relevant. And this means you have to focus on four key actions:<\/p>\n