7 Common College Topics in Application Essays You Should (Must) Avoid

 
"Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment or experience that is important to you."
In some form or other, this prompt will be on almost every college application this fall, leaving admissions officers inevitably to read hundreds of college essay topics that are far too similar.
So how do you distinguish yourself from the sea of other applicants in your personal statement? It all starts with the right topic that simultaneously shows your ability to write well while painting a picture of who you are in a simple and authentic fashion.
No doubt this is easier said than done.
Before you begin brainstorming, make sure you know which college essay topics to avoid and why. Here are a few of the most common.

1. A service project shows your passion for helping others.
"Many students choose to write about their participation in a community service project or a church mission trip," says Marie Schofer, director of admission at Cornell College. "These are fantastic experiences that are personally meaningful and reflect on your character. The only problem: Regardless of where you traveled or what type of service you performed, the conclusion is always the same. You like to help people. This is great," she explains, "but unfortunately, it won't differentiate you from other applications."
2. Your family's history in a specific profession.
"Being proud of family heritage is a wonderful thing, but expanding on family and the roots the family may have in a specific profession is not helpful in selling [yourself]," says Christopher Hall, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. "Mick Jagger may be a fantastic performer and singer," he adds, "but this does not mean that his children will have the same potential. [You] should discuss personal talents and abilities and not the legacy of talents and abilities of [your] great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers."
3. Overcoming an athletic injury.
As Drew Nichols, director of freshman admission at St. Edward's University, explains, "Most university applicant pools are diverse, and many include prospective students who have overcome substantial hardships such as growing up in poverty, difficult family situations or serious illness. The 'athletic injury' essay often indicates a lack of self-awareness on behalf of the applicant regarding their own privilege. If not being able to play soccer for a semester is the most difficult thing [you have] had to encounter," he says, then it "doesn't serve to demonstrate significant resilience or an understanding of the considerable challenges some of [your] peers have faced."
4. A rundown of a national disaster.
The point of a college essay is to get to know you, which gets lost when current events are the main focus, says Michelle Curtis-Bailey, senior admissions advisor and Educational Opportunity Program coordinator at Stony Brook University. After Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, she says, "Many students in the application cycle wrote about the hurricane, as it occurred in late October, peak college application time. Once again, the message is lost as the whole focus was more like a journal entry recounting what happened in the life of the students and their family without a clear connection to the individual. On a whole, we are aware of the impact that disasters have on the lives of our applicants," she says, but "the full scope of the college essay shouldn't recount those types of experiences."
5. A mission trip helped you to understand the struggles of impoverished youth in the U.S.
"We often get essays which describe wonderful experiences working in impoverished international countries doing such things as building houses, helping community members learn English and so on," says Hall. "But as soon as a connection is made by applicants that this experience can help them understand the plight of inner-city youth of America, or that that they have acquired special skills through these experiences to emotionally connect with impoverished U.S. youth, the power of their service work is diminished." Hall says, "Comparing U.S. inner-city youth and communities to Third World or impoverished countries demonstrates a lack of empathy and understanding of the differences in culture."
6. The sports game highlight reel.
"The game-winning catch or other sports highlight is another popular essay topic," Schofer says. "It is important to understand that the admission counselor reading your essay may not be familiar with your sport and will probably have no emotional attachment to the outcome of the District 5 semi-final game." If you do choose to write about a sports topic, Schofer recommends "an essay that debates the merits of the baseball's infield fly rule or a descriptive essay of your warm-up routine."
7. Talking about your role model.
"The challenge with this topic is that we often see essays written about the parent, grandparent, teacher, or coach," says Curtis-Bailey, adding that "most of these essays are written solely about the 'other person' with no reference to the student." She suggests avoiding this topic if you "are unable to show the connection of how the traits and characteristics of that individual are similar or even a model of tangible action that [you desire to take] or have taken."
"While it might be true that a grandparent has been of great influence to the applicant," Nichols points out that "this essay has been written hundreds of times over. When you're competing against hundreds of other students who have submitted the same answer to the prompt," he says, "it becomes more difficult to make your essay distinctive and to really stand out."
Authenticity matters most.
In all, essay readers want to know about you from your point of view. "Think about what is distinctive about [your] particular story," says Nichols, "and articulate that in an honest and meaningful way."
Don't pretend to be someone you're not simply to impress the readers. As Curtis-Bailey points out, "It's evident in reading many essays when a student is using words not commonly used in day-to-day communication that would often give the impression of a unique vocabulary." There's no need to use complex words and jargon, she says, "when all we want to see is [you], not pull a dictionary to gather the context of the terms used."
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Hints for Avoiding Plagiarism

We do not want you to copy text from papers. If you feel it is important to copy the exact sentence(s) used in the original paper, you can put it in quotation marks and cite the original paper. However, this does not require any understanding so it does not get you many marks.

If you copy the text from a paper but do not put it in quotation marks and cite it, that is plagiarism.

To repeat: we want you to copy the ideas (and cite the author of the ideas) but not the words.

We want you to write things in your own words because we want to see if you understand the material. If you use other people's words we can't tell whether you understand the material.

Here are some examples of what you should and should not do. This is part of a paper:

XCS introduced a number of innovations, foremost among them its accuracy-based fitness under which rule fitness is related to its classification accuracy and not the magnitude of the reward it receives as in earlier systems. For lack of space we do not include the details of the XCS updates, but suffice it to say that XCS evaluates the prediction and fitness of each rule. Prediction is, for concept learning tasks such as those we study here, an estimate of the proportion of inputs matched by the rule which belong to the positive class. Prediction is used in conflict resolution, when matching rules perform a weighted vote on the classification of a data point. Accuracy is a measure of the consistency of prediction. Rules with prediction near the maximum or minimum value have high fitness. Higher fitness rules are allocated more reproductive opportunities by the genetic algorithm in XCS, and fitness is also factored into the classification vote.

which we can refer to like this in the bibliography:

[1] T. Kovacs and M. Kerber. High classification accuracy does not imply effective genetic search. To appear in the procedings of GECCO 2004.

If you want to cut-and-paste some exact text from the paper, you should quote and cite it:

Kovacs and Kerber said: ``XCS introduced a number of innovations, foremost among them its accuracy-based fitness under which rule fitness is related to its classification accuracy and not the magnitude of the reward it receives as in earlier systems'' [1] p. 2.

However, as I said you should avoid using quotations in your report. We much prefer you to write things in your own words. For example, it would be ok to write:

XCS made many innovations, of which accuracy-based fitness was the most important [1]. With accuracy-based fitness, a rule's fitness is based on its classification accuracy, not on the magnitude of the reward. XCS evaluates the prediction and fitness of each rule in the system. For concept learning tasks, prediction is an estimate of the proportion of inputs matched by the rule which belong to the positive class.

Notice that although all of the above paragraph is based on the paper we only cite it once, at the end of the first sentence. It is reasonable for the reader to assume that the rest of that paragraph is based on the same cited paper, since the whole paragraph is about the details of the same system.

However, this is not a good paragraph, because it follows the original text very closely and does not show a deep understanding of the subject. It would not get many marks.

It is best to not look at other papers at the time that you are writing your report, unless you need to verify something. In other words, you should read the original papers and make notes on their ideas, and then hide them when you are writing your report. This way, you will copy the ideas (and reference them) but you will not copy the exact text.

If you find you are tempted to copy the words, this may be a sign you may not understand the material very well. (Another reason is that if English is not your first language it can be difficult to say things the way you want to.)

The worst case is to write paragraphs like this:

XCS introduced a number of innovations, foremost among them its accuracy-based fitness under which rule fitness is related to its classification accuracy and not the magnitude of the reward. XCS evaluates the prediction and fitness of each rule. Prediction is an estimate of the proportion of inputs matched by the rule which belong to the positive class. Accuracy is a measure of the consistency of prediction. Higher fitness rules are allocated more reproductive opportunities by the genetic algorithm.

That is just a shorter version of the paragraph in the original paper. You can copy that without understanding very much of the original. So it deserves a low mark. More importantly, we also consider it plagiarism because it is an exact copy of parts of the original and there is no reference or quotation marks. If you write reports by cutting-and-pasting parts of the original papers, the least serious consequence is that you will get 0 marks for the coursework.

So:

• Copy the ideas but not the words.
• Anything that can be cut-and-pasted must be cited.

The discussion above is about what is and what is not plagiarism, and to make the distinction clear I oversimplified the process of presenting ideas when I said "copy the ideas". Although we would like you to present the ideas of others in your own words, the ideal is for you to also critically evaluate them, and to synthesise new ideas, using different sources (perhaps including your own opinions). This shows the greatest depth of understanding.

Admission Essays, Personal Statement, College Admissions

 
I have many other questions that help guide students to write more powerful essays. They include:

• "If you want a college to accept you and even pay for you to attend, what do the admissions officers need to know about you that separates you from the other applicants?"
• "What are your top three activities in high school? How does each relate to what you can offer a college?"
• "If you're going to write about your background or family, can you show who you are now because of them for the majority of the essay?"
• "Can you tell me a specific story related to one of your experiences that can jumpstart your essay?" 

All of this must be done artfully by writers who have had years of experience in writing such an essay which guarantee your admission,   Recommended writing service

PEST (Political, Economical Social and Technological environment) Analysis

The external environment of any organisation / university / faculty / department etc. can be analyzed by conducting a PEST analysis. The acronym PEST (sometimes rearranged as STEP) is used to describe a framework for the analysis a range of macro environmental factors including the Political, Economical Social and Technological environment. A PEST analysis fits into an overall environmental scan including the SWOT analysis and McKinsey’s 7S Model, which is briefly discussed below and also referred to in the document ‘Preparing a SWOT Analysis. For a unit (referring to any area under review be it an academic department, a research unit, an administrative unit or a support service unit), a PEST analysis should relate to:
1. The external environment outside of the unit but within UCC, and
2. The external environment outside of UCC, given the national and international profile of the office
The PEST analysis provides the following simple framework:

Political Factors

Political factors can have a direct impact on the way business operates. Decisions made by government affect the operations of units within the university to a varying degree. Political refers to the big and small ‘p’ political forces and influences that may affect the performance of, or the options open to the unit concerned. The political arena has a huge influence upon the regulation of public and private sector businesses, and the spending power of consumers and other businesses, both within UCC and outside of UCC. Political factors include government regulations and legal issues and define both formal and informal rules under which UCC and units must operate. Depending on its role and function within the university a unit may need to consider issues such as:
• How stable is the internal/external political environment?
• Will government policy influence laws that regulate third level education?
• What is the government\'s policy on the education?
• Is the government involved in trading agreements such as the Bologna Agreement?
• The impact of employment laws
• The impact of environmental regulations
• Trade restrictions and tariffs
• Political stability (internally and externally
• Decision-making structures

Economic Factors

All businesses are affected by economical factors nationally and globally. Whether an economy is in a boom, recession or recovery will also affect consumer confidence and behaviour. The dramatic impact of reduced funds upon UCC is already very apparent. This will impact upon the nature of the competition faced by the university and particular units within the university, upon service provision, and upon the financial resources available within UCC. Economic factors affect the purchasing power of potential customers, and the state of the internal/external economy in the short and long-term. The unit may need to consider:
• Economic growth
• Interest rates
• Inflation rate
• Budget allocation
• The level of inflation
• Employment level per capita
• Long-term prospects for the economy and the impact upon funding of third Level Education etc

Social/Sociological Factors

Social factors will include the demographic changes, trends in the way people live, work and think and cultural aspects of the macro environment. These factors affect customer needs and the size of potential markets (inside and outside of UCC).
• Population growth rate
• Age distribution
• Career attitudes
• Internal/external emphasis on safety
• Internal/external attitudes to change
• What is the stakeholder expectation of the unit?
• What is the perceived impact of the unit upon UCC and external stakeholders?
• How are views expressed?
• How does the unit respond to such views?

Technological Factors

New approaches to doing new and old things, and tackling new and old problems do not necessarily involve technical factors, however, technological factors are vital for competitive advantage, and are a major driver of change and efficiency. Technological; factors can for example lower barriers to entry, reduce minimum efficient production levels, and influence outsourcing decisions. New technology is changing the way business operates. The Internet is having a profound impact on the strategy of organisations. . Academics and administrative staff can now access UCC 24 hours a day comfortably from their homes. Expectations in relation to response times, for example, have altered dramatically. This technological revolution means a faster exchange of information beneficial for businesses as they can react quickly to changes within their operating environment. Those businesses, which are slow to react, will fall at the first few hurdles. What are the implications for the unit? Do we exploit the available technology to the advantage of the unit and UCC?
• Automation
• Technology incentives
• Rate of technological change
• Perception of technological change within the unit
• Stakeholder expectation
• Does technology allow for the services provided by the unit to be created cheaply and to a better standard of quality?
• Do the technologies offer users / stakeholders more innovative services from the unit?
• How is information / decision-making distribution changed by new technologies?
• Does technology offer the unit a new way to communicate within UCC and with external users / stakeholders?
• Does technology offer the unit an opportunity for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) etc?

It is also needed to take into consideration ‘Micro Environmental Factors’, those internal factors close to the unit that have a direct impact on the unit and UCC strategic planning. These will include:
• Customers: Organisations survive on the basis of meeting the needs, wants and providing benefits for their customers. Failure to do so will result in a failed business strategy.
• Employees: Employing the correct staff and keeping these staff motivated is an essential part of the strategic planning process of an organisation. Training and development plays an essential role particular in service sector marketing in-order to gain a competitive edge. This is clearly apparent in the airline industry.
• Suppliers: Increase in raw material prices will have a knock on affect on the marketing mix strategy of an organisation. Prices may be forced up as a result. Closer supplier relationships is one way of ensuring competitive and quality products for an organisation.
• Shareholders: Shareholder expectation and perception.
• Media: Positive or adverse media attention on an organisation’s product or service can in some cases make or break an organisation. Hence the need for a unit website etc.
• Competitors: Are there any internal competitors offering some of the services, information etc. provided by the unit?

The starting point would be to brainstorm an appropriate PEST checklist. The PEST checklist can be used to analyze which factors in the environment are helpful to the unit, and which may impede progress of the unit in achieving its aims. There is of course a danger, common to all checklists, that once an entry has been made under each of the headings it is deemed complete, regardless of whether or not the list reflects the complexity of the reality. Another common error in the implementation is that ‘boxes’ are completed without reference to the aims of the organisation or to the change programme; this can lead to considerable expenditure of time and energy for little benefit.

How to Write an Abstract

Abstract

Because on-line search databases typically contain only abstracts, it is vital to write a complete but concise description of your work to entice potential readers into obtaining a copy of the full paper. This article describes how to write a good computer architecture abstract for both conference and journal papers. Writers should follow a checklist consisting of: motivation, problem statement, approach, results, and conclusions. Following this checklist should increase the chance of people taking the time to obtain and read your complete paper.

Introduction

Now that the use of on-line publication databases is prevalent, writing a really good abstract has become even more important than it was a decade ago. Abstracts have always served the function of \"selling\" your work. But now, instead of merely convincing the reader to keep reading the rest of the attached paper, an abstract must convince the reader to leave the comfort of an office and go hunt down a copy of the article from a library (or worse, obtain one after a long wait through inter-library loan). In a business context, an \"executive summary\" is often the only piece of a report read by the people who matter; and it should be similar in content if not tone to a journal paper abstract.

Checklist: Parts of an Abstract

Despite the fact that an abstract is quite brief, it must do almost as much work as the multi-page paper that follows it. In a computer architecture paper, this means that it should in most cases include the following sections. Each section is typically a single sentence, although there is room for creativity. In particular, the parts may be merged or spread among a set of sentences. Use the following as a checklist for your next abstract:

• Motivation:
Why do we care about the problem and the results? If the problem isn\'t obviously \"interesting\" it might be better to put motivation first; but if your work is incremental progress on a problem that is widely recognized as important, then it is probably better to put the problem statement first to indicate which piece of the larger problem you are breaking off to work on. This section should include the importance of your work, the difficulty of the area, and the impact it might have if successful.

• Problem statement:
What problem are you trying to solve? What is the scope of your work (a generalized approach, or for a specific situation)? Be careful not to use too much jargon. In some cases it is appropriate to put the problem statement before the motivation, but usually this only works if most readers already understand why the problem is important.

• Approach:
How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem? Did you use simulation, analytic models, prototype construction, or analysis of field data for an actual product? What was the extent of your work (did you look at one application program or a hundred programs in twenty different programming languages?) What important variables did you control, ignore, or measure?

• Results:
What\'s the answer? Specifically, most good computer architecture papers conclude that something is so many percent faster, cheaper, smaller, or otherwise better than something else. Put the result there, in numbers. Avoid vague, hand-waving results such as \"very\", \"small\", or \"significant.\" If you must be vague, you are only given license to do so when you can talk about orders-of-magnitude improvement. There is a tension here in that you should not provide numbers that can be easily misinterpreted, but on the other hand you don\'t have room for all the caveats.

• Conclusions:
What are the implications of your answer? Is it going to change the world (unlikely), be a significant \"win\", be a nice hack, or simply serve as a road sign indicating that this path is a waste of time (all of the previous results are useful). Are your results general, potentially generalizable, or specific to a particular case?

Other Considerations

An abstract must be a fully self-contained, capsule description of the paper. It can\'t assume (or attempt to provoke) the reader into flipping through looking for an explanation of what is meant by some vague statement. It must make sense all by itself. Some points to consider include:

• Meet the word count limitation. If your abstract runs too long, either it will be rejected or someone will take a chainsaw to it to get it down to size. Your purposes will be better served by doing the difficult task of cutting yourself, rather than leaving it to someone else who might be more interested in meeting size restrictions than in representing your efforts in the best possible manner. An abstract word limit of 150 to 200 words is common.

• Any major restrictions or limitations on the results should be stated, if only by using \"weasel-words\" such as \"might\", \"could\", \"may\", and \"seem\".

• Think of a half-dozen search phrases and keywords that people looking for your work might use. Be sure that those exact phrases appear in your abstract, so that they will turn up at the top of a search result listing.

• Usually the context of a paper is set by the publication it appears in (for example, IEEE Computer magazine\'s articles are generally about computer technology). But, if your paper appears in a somewhat un-traditional venue, be sure to include in the problem statement the domain or topic area that it is really applicable to.

• Some publications request \"keywords\". These have two purposes. They are used to facilitate keyword index searches, which are greatly reduced in importance now that on-line abstract text searching is commonly used. However, they are also used to assign papers to review committees or editors, which can be extremely important to your fate. So make sure that the keywords you pick make assigning your paper to a review category obvious (for example, if there is a list of conference topics, use your chosen topic area as one of the keyword tuples).

Conclusion

Writing an efficient abstract is hard work, but will repay you with increased impact on the world by enticing people to read your publications. Make sure that all the components of a good abstract are included in the next one you write.

Further Reading

Michaelson, Herbert, How to Write & Publish Engineering Papers and Reports, Oryx Press, 1990. Chapter 6 discusses abstracts.

Cremmins, Edward, The Art of Abstracting 2nd Edition, Info Resources Press, April 1996. This is an entire book about abstracting, written primarily for professional abstractors.

How to write a literature review

 
What is a literature review?

The aim of a literature review is to show your reader (your tutor) that you have read, and have a good grasp of, the main published work concerning a particular topic or question in your field. This work may be in any format, including online sources. It may be a separate assignment, or one of the introductory sections of a report, dissertation or thesis. In the latter cases in particular, the review will be guided by your research objective or by the issue or thesis you are arguing and will provide the framework for your further work.

It is very important to note that your review should not be simply a description of what others have published in the form of a set of summaries, but should take the form of a critical discussion, showing insight and an awareness of differing arguments, theories and approaches. It should be a synthesis and analysis of the relevant published work, linked at all times to your own purpose and rationale.

According to Caulley (1992) of La Trobe University, the literature review should:

· compare and contrast different authors' views on an issue
· group authors who draw similar conclusions
· criticise aspects of methodology
· note areas in which authors are in disagreement
· highlight exemplary studies
· highlight gaps in research
· show how your study relates to previous studies
· show how your study relates to the literature in general
· conclude by summarising what the literature says

The purposes of the review are:

· to define and limit the problem you are working on
· to place your study in an historical perspective
· to avoid unnecessary duplication
· to evaluate promising research methods
· to relate your findings to previous knowledge and suggest further research

A good literature review, therefore, is critical of what has been written, identifies areas of controversy, raises questions and identifies areas which need further research.

Structure of the literature review

The overall structure of your review will depend largely on your own thesis or research area. What you will need to do is to group together and compare and contrast the varying opinions of different writers on certain topics. What you must not do is just describe what one writer says, and then go on to give a general overview of another writer, and then another, and so on. Your structure should be dictated instead by topic areas, controversial issues or by questions to which there are varying approaches and theories. Within each of these sections, you would then discuss what the different literature argues, remembering to link this to your own purpose.

Linking words are important. If you are grouping together writers with similar opinions, you would use words or phrases such as:

similarly, in addition, also, again

More importantly, if there is disagreement, you need to indicate clearly that you are aware of this by the use of linkers such as:

however, on the other hand, conversely, nevertheless

At the end of the review you should include a summary of what the literature implies, which again links to your hypothesis or main question.

Writing the review

You first need to decide what you need to read. In many cases you will be given a booklist or directed towards areas of useful published work. Make sure you use this help. With dissertations, and particularly theses, it will be more down to you to decide. It is important, therefore, to try and decide on the parameters of your research. What exactly are your objectives and what do you need to find out? In your review, are you looking at issues of theory, methodology, policy, quantitive research, or what? Before you start reading it may be useful to compile a list of the main areas and questions involved, and then read with the purpose of finding out about or answering these. Unless something comes up which is particularly important, stick to this list, as it is very easy to get sidetracked, particularly on the internet.

A good literature review needs a clear line of argument. You therefore need to use the critical notes and comments you made whilst doing your reading to express an academic opinion. Make sure that:

· you include a clear, short introduction which gives an outline of the review, including the main topics covered and the order of the arguments, with a brief rationale for this.

· there is always a clear link between your own arguments and the evidence uncovered in your reading. Include a short summary at the end of each section.
Use quotations if appropriate.

· you always acknowledge opinions which do not agree with your thesis. If you ignore opposing viewpoints, your argument will in fact be weaker.


Your review must be written in a formal, academic style. Keep your writing clear and concise, avoiding colloquialisms and personal language. You should always aim to be objective and respectful of others' opinions; this is not the place for emotive language or strong personal opinions. If you thought something was rubbish, use words such as "inconsistent", "lacking in certain areas" or "based on false assumptions"! (See Guide 1.21)

When introducing someone's opinion, don't use "says", but instead an appropriate verb which more accurately reflects this viewpoint, such as "argues", "claims" or "states". Use the present tense for general opinions and theories, or the past when referring to specific research or experiments:

Although Trescovick (2001) argues that attack is the best form of defence, Boycott (1969) claims that ...

In a field study carried out amongst the homeless of Sydney, Warne (1999) found that ...

And remember at all times to avoid plagiarising your sources. Always separate your source opinions from your own hypothesis. making sure you consistently reference the literature you are referring to. When you are doing your reading and making notes, it might be an idea to use different colours to distinguish between your ideas and those of others. (See Guide 1.13).

Final checklist

Here is a final checklist, courtesy of the University of Melbourne: (http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/postgrad/litreview/finalchecklist.html)

Selection of Sources

Have you indicated the purpose of the review?
- Are the parameters of the review reasonable?
- Why did you include some of the literature and exclude others?
- Which years did you exclude?
- Have you emphasised recent developments?
- Have you focussed on primary sources with only selective use of secondary sources?
- Is the literature you have selected relevant?
- Is your bibliographic data complete?

Critical Evaluation of the Literature

- Have you organised your material according to issues?
- Is there a logic to the way you organised the material?
- Does the amount of detail included on an issue relate to its importance?
- Have you been sufficiently critical of design and methodological issues?
- Have you indicated when results were conflicting or inconclusive and discussed possible reasons?
- Have you indicated the relevance of each reference to your research?

Interpretation

- Has your summary of the current literature contributed to the reader's understanding of the problems?
- Does the design of your research reflect the methodological implications of the literature review?

Note

- The literature review will be judged in the context of your completed research.
- The review needs to further the reader's understanding of the problem and whether it provides a rationale for your research.

The Importance of Literature Reviews

 


1 - Introduction

In this article we will talk about the importance of literature reviews as a way of summarsing the state of the art of a field. We will examine ways of constructing literature reviews and we will see in the links provided examples of literature reviews.

2 - Definition of literature review

A critical summary and an assessment of the current state of knowledge or current state of the art in a particular field.

The ability to carry out a literature review is an important skill for any student. It will provide you with a context in which to place your assignments regardless of the module you are studying. Practically any assignment in any module you take will involve reading what other people have written on the subject of your assignment, gathering information to refute or support specific arguments, and writing about yourfindings. For small scale projects, (like module assignments), you will not be expected to provide a definitive account of the state of research in your selected topic. You will be required to provide evidence that you have read a certain amount of relevant literature in the topic, that you have understood that literature, and that you can summarize the material you have read in a coherent way. The literature review is precisely that summary.

In order to do a literature review you will need to spend time reading the literature relevant to the topic you are researching. Understanding the literature in your research topic will prevent you from repeating previous errors, or redoing work which has already been done. It will also give you insights into aspects of your topic which might be worthy of exploration and future research.

3 - Purpose of a Literature Review

There are several purposes to writing a literature review.

To provide the reader with an up to date account and discussion of the research findings in a particular topic. This might sound pretty esoteric but you will find that in writing a literature review you will learn about the ways other people have constructed their own research projects. Seeing what others have done might help you understand your own assignment. You might be able to see the methods that other more experienced researchers have used and you might decide to follow on their footsteps and copy their methodological approach.

You might also be able to detect conflicting points of view expressed by different authors. These conflicting points of view might be the indicators of diverging theories within the same topic. You need to be aware of these conflicting theories as well as of the arguments supporting these theories in order for you to assess their value and make up your own mind on the topic. Being aware of the theories will help you later in your life as a student when you will have to design a larger research project like your dissertation.

You might also be able to discuss relevant research carried out in the same topic. It is important to be able to discuss relevant research because very often it is very difficult (as students and as researchers) to keep abreast of everything that is published every year in a topic. The job of the writer of the literature review is to summarize and discuss the major documents published in that topic over a stated period of time. The discussion will take into account the methods and the results or findings of the most relevant research. The reviewer will assess whether the methodology is appropriate and whether the results seem valid. The reviewer therefore evaluates the quality of the research as opposed to merely listing documents.

The reviewer may also discuss material published in other fields which are related to the main topic. This process is very important since very often research in the social sciences is multidisciplinary, i.e. knowledge gets generated from many disciplines and needs to be integrated. For example in order to be able to research and write a literature review on a question like ‘Why do teenagers smoke? ‘ The reviewer might need to read material from journals in psychology, medicine, and sociology.

4 - Mechanics of Writing a Literature Review

You need to read. You need to read because it will give you ideas, and because it might improve your writing style. You need to develop some basic reading strategies. You need to decide:

• where to read
• what to read
• whom to read
• how to find what you need to read

Your University or College library might be your first port of call in deciding where to read, but as you progress in your course you might need to read in other libraries. You might also chose to photocopy material from these libraries and read it at home. The advantage of using photocopies is that you can underline the material and make notes.

The question of what to read is more tricky. Books, journals, reports, popular media, computer-based material, internal reports, letters, conference proceedings etc. You will probably need to read all these when you are constructing a literature review.

When you try to determine whom to read you need to be aware that anyone can be mistaken in their interpretations or their opinions. It is therefore important that you can be able to ascertain how authoritative is the person that you are reading. You should also be able to ascertain their motivation in writing. This might help you determine if the person has a biased perspective on an issue. You should be guided on what to read (at least as a starting point ) by your module coordinator(s) and seminar tutors however, that is only initial guidance, after that you should be capable of finding your own material.

Once you have set-up your basic reading strategies, you will need to be able to understand what you read. This is slightly more complicated than it seems because you will need to be able to develop tricks to scan a lot of documents very fast, and decide if a particular document is good enough to merit careful reading. It takes practice to be able to look at a document in the library and determine if it is good enough for you to spend serious time reading it. Have a look at the table of contents and index of the book. Look at the introduction and concluding chapter . Scan some of the topics from the index and determine if the material is adequate. These hints will give you a superficial knowledge about the content of a document, however you will not be able to write a literature review based on superficial knowledge. You will have to read enough to know enough about what has been written and summarize it in an intelligent fashion. In other words, you need to know enough to be able to be critical about it. Once you select a document for serious reading, you will need to summarize and criticize it.

I am including here some material from the session on abstracting to refresh your memory since you will need to make a large number of abstracts before you are able to construct a literature review.

5 - Definition of an Abstract

An abstract is a summary of the main nts of the document.

Purpose of the Abstract. To provide enough description of the content of the document to enable the reader to decide whether the document is worth reading in its entirety.

Mechanics of writing an abstract. You might decide that you will want to make your abstracts on index cards. This is fine, however there are also possibilities of making abstracts in your word processor, or within a bibliographic database. These are more convenient that index cards as you can keep the information stored in electronic form and therefore ‘cut and paste it’ in many documents. I recommend you keep your abstracts in electronic form.

Usually your summary will include :

the title of the document
the authors
the publisher
the place of publication
the pages and year of publication.

This type of information is called bibliographic details. They are always preceding the abstract. The abstract proper will contain a description of the purpose of the research, the methods used and a short description of the major findings.

6 - Study Aides: What do I need to remember from this session?

• Purpose of a literature review
• Benefits of reading literature reviews in my own studies
• Mechanics of construction of a literature review
• Mechanics of Abstracting