I've Lost My Voice!

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider

-- Francis Bacon, Of Studies, 1605

This post will address several questions that seem to be popping up, such as:

• When do I get to put my own voice into this paper?
• It feels like I am citing every sentence, is this right?
• Are we simply reciting what we are finding in our research?
• Any suggestions on how to do this without any of my own opinions?
• How do I write this without just putting quote after quote?

I think you get the idea...And for the answer, let's go back to what it is that we are writing. A literature review by definition is a summary of current research on a topic. If you think about it that way, what you are writing is a summary of what you have read. You won't use your voice, your opinion, or your experiences to write this summary. If you were to assign a summary of a book or chapter in your classroom, you wouldn't expect your students to include their opinions in the writing, and you may not even expect to hear their voice, or to make connections with their own life (unless you specifically asked for those things.)

Now to the questions about all of the citations...I grabbed this paragraph from a "how to" website:

A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question.

I think the important words here come pretty close to the end and they are synthesize and evaluate. As you are going through the research, you want to be thinking not only of the current piece you are reading, but also how it fits in with the previous research you have read. If the current piece is in opposition to something you have read before, you can discuss in your paper how there are differing opinions on the topic. If they are in line with each other, you can talk about how several researchers share the opinion; or even that they share the opinion but have different suggestions about how it could be implemented in the classroom.

When you are citing the research in your paper, it may feel like you have one right after the other. This is very common in a lit review, because the only thing you are discussing is the research. If you look at the examples I have added to blackboard, you will see that it is normal to have many citations. That's probably one way that this assignment differs from the kind of writing you may have done in undergrad classes.

One thing to remember, though, is that you need to balance direct quotes with your own words. If you are synthesizing and summarizing, you need to have your own words throughout the paper. Otherwise, you are just providing an organized list of quotes for the reader. Your job is to tell the reader how the research fits together.

When you summarize your paper, you may want to include how you will put this research into practice. Here you can use first person and your own ideas, but this would be the only place.

I hope this has helped answer some of those questions. As you read, weigh the ideas and consider how they fit with your other reading...and then decide how you want to share this with your reader.