Outline of the Comprehensive Literature Review and Scholarly Writing Reflection
Instructions
Use the concept map to create a detailed outline of your Comprehensive Literature Review paper. This assignment is intended to help you find a logical focus to your writing and to help alleviate alignment problems in your final document. It is also intended to help you focus on the overarching task for this course: to write a brief literature review. For this assignment, submit the following:
· Create a comprehensive concise outline that you will use to write your literature review. The outline should include more than simply topic headings from your concept map; instead, provide details regarding the scholarly sources under each heading with connections between the findings of the different studies.
These connections should align specific articles to topics and subtopics you have already defined. Do not simply list information about each article as is done for annotated bibliographies; ask yourself how the article conclusions or finding relate to topic and subtopic ideas or identified gaps in the research.
· The length of the outline may vary depending on your topic area, but it should have enough detail that it is at least 2 pages. Remember that you need to include at least 8 scholarly sources that you used in your concept map for this assignment.
· Provide enough detail that a reader may discern the overall ideas that your paper will present and how the literature supports and relates to your ideas. Make sure to use your detailed notes on each source and your concept map to help you with your assignment.
· The conceptual/theoretical framework is a foundational piece of the dissertation writing process. As you complete this assignment, make sure to note the conceptual frameworks or theoretical frameworks used by the researchers in your outline. You will focus more on the framework in the coming weeks.
Length: 3-5 pages
Your paper should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards.
Sources:
The Importance of Peer Review and Outline of the Literature Review
As you continue with your doctoral studies, you will continue to learn about the journey of becoming an independent scholar. This is where you will learn the skills and knowledge required to become a creator of knowledge, rather than only a consumer of knowledge. Part of this process is learning about and appreciating the iterative and collaborative nature of academic writing.
Successfully navigating the process of academic writing requires you to become comfortable with receiving constructive feedback, rather than taking it personally. Feedback on your writing is not meant to be critical of you. Rather, it is intended to help you elevate the level of your writing so that you can write objectively and with precision and accuracy.
One of the main points of this course is that scholarly writing is a process in which you should constantly work on your writing. Part of this process also involves realizing that you must write-a lot-and revise your work several times before you submit it to your faculty member, dissertation chair, or journal reviewer for feedback.
The articles and chapters you have been reading in this course have likely undergone multiple revisions-probably too many for the authors to count - before being published. Part of becoming an independent scholar is realizing that you will need to do the same to hone your writing skills continually.
Part of the process of academic writing involves taking a methodical and organized approach to your writing. The assignment for this week will help you further organize your thinking before you begin to write the comprehensive review.
So far in the course, you have been working on collecting and reviewing scholarly sources as well as exploring different ways of how to process the information gathered. For example, last week you used a concept map to organize the information you have gathered into themes. The next step in this process is to organize these themes into an outline for the comprehensive review you will write.
It is likely that as you begin to write, you will realize that you need to conduct additional searches for some of the themes/categories in your review; this is part of the cyclical nature of writing a review of the literature.
As you search and read articles, you want to engage in critical reading strategies. This will be important once you begin the literature review for your dissertation because you are required to engage in not only synthesizing, but also critically analyzing the scholarly literature. It is imperative that you begin to hone these skills now.