Sam Tsai 蔡坤憲

HOW CAN I WRITE A GOOD LITERATURE REVIEW? Remember the purpose: it should answer the questions we looked at above . Look at how published writers review the literature. You'll see that you should use the literature to explain your research - after all, you are not writing a literature review just to tell your reader what other researchers have done. You aim should be to show why your research needs to be carried out, how you came to choose certain methodologies or theories to work with, how your work adds to the research already carried out, etc. Read with a purpose: you need to summarize the work you read but you must also decide which ideas or information are important to your research (so you can emphasize them), and which are less important and can be covered briefly or left out of your review. You should also look for the major concepts, conclusions, theories, arguments etc. that underlie the work, and look for similarities and differences with closely related work. This

To remind myself -- Writing up Research: http://www.languages.ait.ac.th/EL21OPEN.HTM The Basics of Good Writing So you're going to sit down at your computer, go through your notes, and in a few hours produce a piece of research writing. Right? Wrong! It is impossible to start from nothing and produce a good piece of writing, because it is very hard to organize your material and write at the same time . If you are working out which piece of research to talk about next and worrying about verb agreement, you are less likely to produce a good piece of writing. Here are some suggestions: Plan your writing. Before you start writing, find a way to organize your material so that you know what you are going to write about, in what order, and what you're going to say. Try writing an outline. Trying writing your ideas down on the back of an envelope, or a piece of old paper. It doesn't have to be beautiful, it just has to help you think about what you are going to say. Use whatev