Length: 2000-2500 words
Worth: 20% of your Final Grade
Final draft due: by email, Oct 28, start of class (please see file naming guidelines in the syllabus)

In the first unit of the course, we’ve talked about how writing conventions both reflect and inscribe the values of the communities that use them, especially academic disciplinary communities. You will now have a chance to practice doing this inscription yourself by describing the current work in your field, on a topic of your choice, in a particular way.

Genre

For this assignment, I’d like you to write a literature review on narrow topic about which there is recently circulating scholarly material. A literature review assembles and synthesizes current contributions to academic knowledge about its topic. You might think of it as a more developed, stand-alone version of the section of the introduction in an “IMRDS” research paper, one that discusses prior research related to the paper’s topic. You may have already come across this genre by another name: in engineering and computer science, for example, it’s sometimes called a “survey paper” or “state of the art paper.”

A literature review finds patterns in the work that it describes. While it may not be an “argument-driven” essay, in that there is usually no explicitly stated thesis statement, literature reviews do argue. By existing, they argue implicitly that their chosen topic is worth discussing. They also argue the value of certain texts, which they do by including or highlighting some contributions, while downplaying or omitting others. To quote Penrose and Katz, the review “represents one expert reader’s interpretation of the state of knowledge in the field” (133). Meanwhile, it highlights gaps in the existing research, which emerge according to the patterns that this reader (who is now also an author) finds in the body of work.

While this is the longest piece of writing you’ll write this term, the style and conventions will likely seem familiar to you in an academic context. We will talk in class about the ways that academic writing conventions work in this particular genre. While writing, you may refer to Chapter 5 of Penrose and Katz, especially 5.2 for a full description of the genre, as well a model literature review and tips for writing them later in the chapter.

Conducting your Research

In class, we will go over:

You may use these resources to narrow down and select your sources. We will talk further in class about what constitutes a reliable source, as well as what constitutes a prominent or influential one.

Audience

The audience for this assignment will be a community of scholars who are members of a particular academic field. They may be familiar with aspects of your topic, but not all of it. As you’ve read in Ch. 5.2 of Penrose and Katz, literature reviews tend to be written for a broad readership of people in a scholarly community, rather than a group of specialists. Which terms might this broader audience not be aware of, so that you need to gloss? With which ones will they be familiar? It may be helpful, here, to identify a real-world audience by selecting a particular journal to whose readers you might write.

Tone

For this assignment, you’ll be adopting a formal, academic style, one that is to some extent dispassionate and objective. The best way to get a sense of the tone of academic writing is to read academic writing. We’ll also go over some style conventions for scientific and technical writing, in particular, during class. When incorporating sources, you might gravitate toward paraphrasing, attributing to source using signal phrases and reporting verbs, rather than direct quotes. Quotes should be used if the original author’s particular phrasing is significant to what you are discussing, but paraphrasing is more often used in this genre since it re-interprets the material being presented in the voice of the lit review’s author.

Assignment Requirements

Annotated Bibliography

(Ungraded; Due Oct 9)

Please assemble 6-10 scholarly sources in a bibliography written in a style of your choice (IEEE and ACE citation might be good choices) that incorporates a prose description for each entry. As described here, this prose should:

  • summarize the source
  • evaluate the source
  • explain the relevance of the source to your treatment of your topic, justifying your selection of it

As with any other component of your drafting in this course, I will not be grading the annotated bibliography, but just checking that you did it. This is for you to help get you going. Your annotations for the sources you are choosing will start you writing about how they interact with one another, and you can use any of the language you wish from these annotations in your paper.

AND

Literature Review Paper

I will be looking for:

  • Evidence that you’ve identified a specific academic field as an audience, and that you’ve surveyed the scholarship in that field.
    • What field or fields is the work on this topic being produced in? If not the same one(s), what field are you writing your literature review in? Refer to the Penrose and Katz chapters for help on strategies for this.
  • 6-10 scholarly, refereed or peer-reviewed sources that represent the most prominent work about the topic
    • While Penrose and Katz cite comprehensiveness and timeliness as features of a publishable literature review, you won’t have in this assignment to be comprehensive. And because literature reviews, none can be comprehensive. We will talk in class about how to identify prominent & influential sources.
  • Discussion of these sources that compares and contrasts the sources’ arguments, theories, and methods, rather than only reporting on them.
    • What do the authors agree about? Disagree about? What are the major areas of consensus, or controversy and debate?
    • Synthesize and evaluate the research. What are potential assumptions and biases?
  • Organization of your paper according to some pattern or scheme that you identify in the work, bookended by introduction and conclusion paragraphs.
    • Some examples of organizational schemes might be by problem, by researcher, or by chronology
  • you to guide your reader through this organizational structure with conventions common to the genre
    • We’ve talked about signposting, transition words and commas, etc.
  • In the final version (don’t worry about it for the draft), an abstract for the paper. This is most often best written after the paper itself. We will go over abstract writing in class.

Another Option

I want the writing you do in this course to let you further your own goals where possible. Instead of writing a standalone literature review article, you might choose to author or revise the literature review section of a scientific/technical article that you’re already working on in another context (research, co-op, etc.).

If you choose this option, please submit:

  • the lit review section of this larger paper that follows the above assignment guidelines, except for length
    • remember, here, that literature review sections are shorter than standalone literature review articles, and also add a move (usually at the end of the section) that outlines the goal of the article (see Penrose & Katz 5.2)
  • a 600 word reflective note, describing:
    • what the purpose of your existing article is in relation to the research project, and what how the literature review section of the article furthers this goal
    • how including the literature review as a section in a larger paper changes your choice of relevant conventions, versus if it was written as a standalone review paper
    • if revised rather than authored anew, discuss key patterns in your revisions that were informed by your study of the literature review genre in this class