Literature Review Instructions:
For this assignment, write a literature review in which you summarize and synthesize at least five sources. At least three of these sources must be academic: peer-reviewed articles, books from an academic press, published reports, etc.
At this point in the semester, you should have a sizeable number of sources (books, articles, websites, videos, audio clips, etc.) about your topic. Your task in this assignment is to narrow your pool of sources and uncover the patterns of ideas contained in these sources. What are the types of questions that these authors ask, how do they answer those questions, what kinds of evidence do they use, and are there problems that remain unresolved in the existing research? To answer these questions, you will first need to construct a clear outline that maps out the ideas explored by each author. This will then allow you to determine the structure for your literature review.
The literature review should be organized as an essay with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. Your introduction should define your topic, explain your organizational strategy (how you selected and categorized the sources), and offers a thesis about the connections between your sources and their relationship to your topic. The body paragraphs should summarize and synthesize your sources and make connections between them based on topics, arguments, methodologies, evidence, etc. Finally, your conclusion should offer an evaluation of the sources, identify gaps in the research, and explain how you plan to contribute to the conversation with your research project.
Your literature review should be 4-pages long and use standard MLA-style to cite your sources and format your document: typed, double-spaced, one-inch margins, 12-point Times font, etc. You should also include a MLA-style Works Cited page that lists all of the sources discussed in your literature review.
Successful Literature Reviews will:
Make an argument about the connections between your sources and their relationship to your topic
Introduce and maintain a clear organization for the document
Quote, paraphrase, and summarize effectively from source texts.
Provide context so your argument is understandable to a reader who has not read the source texts.
Demonstrate sentence-level correctness
Include an MLA-style Works Cited page