Literature review is a crucial part of your dissertation. Regardless of what kind of dissertation you’re writing, having a neatly structured literature review chapter is a must.
Why? Well, because you simply can’t conduct a research study without a research question, and you can’t find a good research question without consulting scholarly literature. Now, what you learn from this review of literature goes into the literature review chapter because you need to demonstrate what you learned. See how it becomes a necessary part of your dissertation?
This is why it’s very important you learn all you can about the structure of a literature review. Making a complex literary debate easy to follow for your reader is already a difficult task, and you’ll only make it more so by not paying attention to your literature review structure.
Don’t forget these four crucial things when you draft your chapter and you’ll end up with a great literature review format.
- It’s an Essay.
You must write your literature review like an essay. That means you need to make sure your structured literature review looks like a structured essay indeed.
我们在学校学过一篇文章有三个主要部分:引言、正文和结论。这就是划分文献综述的方法。恰当地划分单词的技巧很简单。记住，引言和结论各占文章字数的10%。剩下的80%进入人体。所以，如果你要写一篇4000字的文献综述，引言和结论各用400字，主体部分用3200字。
Another thing about formatting a literature review like an essay is you should remember the chapter is part of a bigger whole, your dissertation (or paper). Leave details of other chapters out of your literature review.
- OK. It’s a Long Essay.
一份文献综述稿通常很长，这可能会让作者感到复杂。你应该写一篇很长的文章，通过一些由你的研究目标联系在一起的独立辩论。你应该写一篇有趣的文章，让你学校的委员会成员和后续的读者喜欢读到最后。
With that kind of pressure, there’s one thing that can help you do a great job of writing that draft apart from good writing itself. That’s formatting. While there is no one particular literature review format for thesis (or dissertation) writing, use the traditional styles of the formatting system your university favours, be it Harvard, APA, or any other.
- Big Headlines to Fine Print
Another important thing to remember is to structure your literature review content in a downward spiral. Like I hinted earlier, you’ll be using multiple debates out of the literature you read in your literature review chapter. You can’t go about discussing them all at once. Of course, you’ll need to write them in separate sections of the chapter.
The key to success here is to make sure you start each section with discussing the broad ideas of the debate and then trickle down your paragraphs to the finer details of the arguments involved.
- Make it Visually Appealing
Last, but not the least, make sure your literature review structure looks appealing. With tools, such as the right line spacing, paragraph spacing, visible font size for the text, different font sizes and effects for varying uses of text,etc., you can make your structured literature review look soothing to the eye and easy to follow.
Don’t forget to use multiple heading levels to improve the quality of your text. Subsection headers of multiple levels make it easier for the reader to follow the debate you’re reporting.
How did you like these important things to remember about structuring your literature review? Tell me in your replies below. Oh, and don’t forget to have a look at世界杯2022赛程时间表最新
**Download a Free Literature Review Sample**
To demonstrate our skills, we are happy to give you a complete literature review chapter one of our writers wrote as a sample. To get the sample, fill in the details below: