Scholarly Article : Literature Review
[submit your final draft of this assignment via turnitin.com]
In this assignment you will write about something that genuinely interests you. The more personally intrigued you are with your topic, the better this project will turn out. If you’re bored… CHANGE YOUR TOPIC!!
TASK: You should start with something that intrigues you – maybe something you learned in another class, or something from your personal interests. If that’s too difficult, talk to me and we’ll come up with other options. You will then try your best to generate more thinking on this topic – something above and beyond whatever you learned in your previous course. You must read several academic articles that explore this topic directly (or obliquely), and then write your own article. In your academic article, you will try to make as many of your sources connect to one another as possible. Often this kind of article will even pull from sources outside a given field in order to explore a very specific detail. For example, think of a Kinesiology article that cites a Neuroscience article in order to explain a brain/mind connection to motor function.
The specific article that you are writing is called a literature review. This is a genre that scholars write to other scholars which reviews what various studies have been saying about a particular question. You will become one of these scholars and enter into their conversation and use it for your own interests, your own questions. If we think about Bartholomae – you will be appropriating a discourse, not the other way around.
Your final paper should use many of the same moves that you find in the articles that you are reading. You should write in the same register, should use similar vocabulary and grammar, should use subtitles to organize sections, and, most importantly, should write as a scholar among peers. Some students have even made use of an abstract. If you would like to do this try your best to understand how another article has used an abstract and try to write yours with the same purpose. It’s even okay for you to “meta-announce” as many academic articles do this. While your teachers often discourage this for essays, it’s actually okay to open a section of an article by clearly writing: “In this section I will…”
While much of your article will be built by paraphrasing the other articles that you are reading, you should also try to include at least a little bit of your own voice as you make the different scholars talk to one another. A template that might help you see how this works would be written as: “What X found in her study relates to my overall question of _ because .”
This article is not an easy task, but it becomes incredibly simplified if you apply templates from They Say I Say. In particular, you should use the several chapters that have been assigned already (3, 4, 6, 8, and 10) but should now also use chapters 5 and 9, both of which will be critical for your success with this paper. I cannot emphasize enough how much They Say I Say will relieve the difficulties that you WILL encounter while writing this article. This goes especially for those of you who have avoided reading the textbook up to this point.
Sample Solution
