How to write review in english

How to write a review? | C2 Proficient (CPE)

A review may be about a book, magazine, film, play, or concert, but it may also be about, for example, an exhibition.

A review does not merely require a general description of a film or publication, but it specifies the particular aspects to be considered. For example, the review may employ narrative, as well as descriptive and evaluative language, and a range of vocabulary relating, for example, to literature and the media such as cinema or TV.

C2 Proficient (CPE) Review: Structure

CAE, FCE, CPE

More than Practice Tests

C2 Proficient (CPE) Review: Writing Guide

The CPE review may be neutral or informal, depending on the target group. Use a descriptive vocabulary and language relevant to the topic.

Review: Introduction

The introduction focuses on the identification of the author, the title, the main topic or issue presented in the question as well as the author’s purpose.

One of my favourite childhood books is the ‘Six Bullerby Children’ written by Astrid Lindergren, a famous Swedish author. The story is set in a three-farm remote village of Bullerby in Sweden.

If your task requires to review a book or article concerning particular issues or topic, your introduction must also meet these expectations. In other words, the more complex your task is, the more you have to implement in your introduction.

Ultimately, to make your introduction more engaging you can determine your position as a reviewer and briefly state your general impression on it.

Review: Main Body

Order the body of your review according to a logical plan foe example:

Again, for each paragraph, it’s efficient to use the topic sentence to identify the point from the book or the article you intend to summarise or evaluate using one or the other pattern.

Review: Recommendation

You should now evaluate the work as a whole, determining whether the author achieves the intended or implied goal and whether the work makes a significant contribution to the existing knowledge.

Use this paragraph to sum up the good and bad points to make an objective assessment of the reviewed material. You may then recommend or dissuade your readers from seeing/attending it.

C2 Proficient (CPE) Review: Sample Answers

CPE Review Sample 1

Review subject:

A TV listings magazine has invited readers to contribute a review of a television series that is particularly popular at the moment. Write a review, explaining why this programme is so popular in your opinion and commenting on whether you believe it deserves such popularity.

Student’s CPE Review Answer:

I find myself waiting for Friday night impatiently to turn on my TV and enjoy my favourite programme. And I do believe I’m not the only one. It’s just hilarious, you know.

Get Your (CPE) Review Checked!

CPE Review Sample 2

Review subject:

A literary magazine is running a series of reviews of books that people enjoyed reading as a child and would recommend for children today. You decide to send in a review in which you describe a book you enjoyed and the attractions it had for you as a child. You should also explain why you feel it remains relevant for children today.

Student’s CPE Review Answer:

One of my favourite childhood books is the ‘Six Bullerby Children’ written by Astrid Lindergren, a famous Swedish author. The story is set in a three-farm remote village of Bullerby in Sweden.

The narrator is a seven-year-old girl, Lisa who, with her parents and two older brothers – Lasse and Bosse, lives in one of the houses. Lisa describes the daily life of the children in Bullerby which – contrary to what one might think when imagining life in a small, remote village – is far from boring. The children have plenty of funny ideas, which often lead to amusing adventures.

Although the book was included in the compulsory school literature when I was a child (which often meant long, boring reads), I have truly enjoyed the adventures of Lisa and her friends. Despite very limited resources (the story is set in 1930s when children did not have many toys, not to mention a TV or video games!) the children always come up with exciting games or things to play with. This is something I admired and wished I could do when reading the book.

Another thing which appealed to me as a child was the natural childlike way in which Lisa (or Astrid Lindgren, the author) could tell the story connecting effortlessly with the young readers.

Despite the environment in which the children live nowadays has changed considerably since 1930s, children will always be children and if the book has appealed to so many young generations since it was published, I believe it will retain its impact. It can be more, even more relevant today, when children are presented with things to play, instead of inventing games themselves. Reading the book could definitely wake up their innate creativity.

‘Six Bullerby Children’ could, however, also be more relevant to adults who would like to either ‘return’ to their childhood for a little while, or be able to connect with their own children a bit better.

Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE): How to Write a Review

Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE): How to Write a Review

Introduction

A review may be about a book, magazine, film, play or concert; it may also be about a product or a service. A review in the C1 Advanced Writing paper does not merely ask for a general description of the thing reviewed, but requires an evaluation of its suitability for a particular purpose or audience. The target reader is specified in the task, and candidates should be encouraged to use this information when choosing appropriate ideas and language to include in their response.

from: Cambridge English First Handbook for Teachers

Reviews are fun!

Reviews are fun because reading reviews is fun. Who doesn’t enjoy a few opinions from other people before making the decision on which restaurant to go to, which film to watch or which book to buy? Also, in our day and age, we are constantly looking at social proof for a wide range of topics so reviews are much more natural to us than they were only a few years ago when the internet wasn’t everywhere so you might even have written about a few of your own experiences online.

Of course, when writing a review for C1 Advanced you have to follow a specific structure and fulfill certain requirements, but the good thing for you is that they are always the same so you can study and practise them and become better every single day until you get to the official exam and it won’t be a problem for you anymore.

We are going to look at different aspects of review writing, from looking at a typical task and its structure, useful language and mistakes to avoid. If you are interested, keep reading.

What a typical review task looks like

Speaking from my experience as a teacher and preparing numerous students for the exam, I can say that most review tasks look pretty much the same. The structure is very very similar and once you know what to look for, you can use it to your advantage by saving a lot of time and going into the test ready and calm.

When you see a writing task for C1 Advanced (not only reviews, but really all of them), you should always ask your self a few very specific questions which can help you to better understand what you have to do and set you up for a successful writing exam.

To find the answers to these three questions read the task very carefully and underline the key information.

I underlined the information in different colours as each colour refers to one of the questions from above. First of all, the topic is underlined with red. Secondly, the main points or questions you have to answer in your review are green and, finally, you are writing for a website called Great Lives (blue).

This structure is usually the same in every task so make sure that you look for the same type of information whenever you sit down to practise reviews.

You might ask yourself why it is so important to know who you are writing for, but this tells you exactly if you should use formal, neutral or informal language. Imagine you had to write to your boss or the director of your school. You would choose a more formal style than if you were writing to your friends. In our example, we should choose something that is more of a neutral style. After all, we don’t the people on the website, but we want to keep it light and as interesting as possible.

When writing in a neutral style you can use contractions like ‘I’m’ or ‘don’t’ and you can use phrasal verbs as well as interesting adjectives and adverbs to make your review more lively. However, I wouldn’t recommend using slang words or too many colloquial expressions nor anything that is too formal as you would in an essay or formal letter.

How to organise your review

Now that we know what the task’s topic is, what exactly we need to include and the tone we should write in, it is time to look at the structure of a review. Luckily, this can be repeated from review to review and you simply have to change the content depending on the topic and main points.

Remember, there are two main questions for you to answer here (Did you learn anything new about the person’s life? Did the book or film help you understand why this person made their important contribution?) It makes a lot of sense to give each of those questions their own paragraph as they talk about different aspects of your review.

Additionally, you should add an introduction (with a title) in which you create some anticipation and engage the reader as well as a conclusion where you summarise your main points and make a recommendation (because that’s why we read reviews). In total, that comes to four paragraphs which could look like this:

Obviously, your main topic paragraphs should be longer than the intro and conclusion, and keep in mind that there is a word limit of 220-260 words.

Always plan your review

I say this in every article I write here on teacherphill.com and I’m going to say it again in this post because it is such an important piece of advice. Unfortunately, many candidates simply ignore or forget about it and find themselves in the official C1 Advanced exam nervous and unprepared so I want you to include this in your practice.

Whenever you sit down to write for your exam preparation, make a plan before you start your review, report, proposal, email/letter or essay. It only takes 3-5 minutes and it can save you so much time down the road when you need to make corrections.

A plan can be very short and only include a few keywords that you add under each heading so you know what you want to write about and don’t have to rethink everything halfway through the writing task.

There you have it. It took me just a couple of minutes to jot down my ideas and now that they are recorded on paper we are ready to write our review.

The different parts of a review

After looking at how to analyse a task as well as organise and plan your review, it is time to get into actually writing it. We are still going to work on our example task and, of course, you might have to adjust your language and content for different topics, but you should get a good idea of what is expected from you when writing a review for C1 Advanced.

Introduction

The introduction of a review aims to engage the reader from the beginning. You want to create interest and anticipation of what you have to say about the book, film, restaurant or whatever else you might be reviewing.

It is always a good idea to start with a question because you can involve the reader’s own mind and, therefore, generate the engagement you want. Also, don’t give any spoilers, but hint at what’s going to come in the rest of the text.

Let’s look at a possible introduction.

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom – a review

Have you ever been so passionate about something that you would sacrifice your very best years for it? Would you even put it ahead of your family and friends? In the film Mandela: Lond Walk to Freedom we get not only a glimpse of Nelson Mandela’s life, but rather dive deep into who he was and how he changed a whole country.

I gave my review a title, which doesn’t have to be fancy, and in the introduction I didn’t do anything crazy either. It starts with a couple of questions to generate interest and I don’t give away too much of the storyline. Obviously, a lot of people know something about Nelson Mandela’s life, but that’s not the point. Give the reader just a tiny little taste so they want more and keep reading.

The body of your review for C1 Advanced includes all the main topic points that we elicited earlier from the example task.

Each point gets its own paragraph to make sure that the text is clearly organised.

You also want to make sure that you keep the reader’s attention which you have carefully caught in the introduction. Treat it like something very valuable that you don’t want to lose again until the end of your review.

While the whole film captivated me throughout, there was one aspect that truly stood out to me. Nelson Mandela and his second wife Winnie had a one-of-a-kind relationship driving each other to continue and grow the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa even after Mr Mandela was captured and imprisoned. It is a testament to their dedication and partnership and something that a lot of us can learn from.

Despite having a strong and driven partner in his wife, I still used to be astonished by the fact that someone would simply sacrifice themselves and give up a big part of their life to help others, but this biopic made me reconsider. Witnessing a segregated society and all the racial abuse the black community had to endure during apartheid, there was no other option for Nelson Mandela than to stand up and fight for equality.

I’ve highlighted some of the more important language features for you. At the beginning of each paragraph, I play with contrasting statements (while, despite) as this keeps the reader guessing. I also tried to use some vocabulary that is specific to Mandela’s life (anti-apartheid movement, sacrifice themselves, segregated society, racial abuse…had to endure, stand up and fight for equality) and some words and expressions to make the review more interesting for the reader (one-of-a-kind, captured and imprisoned, it is a testament to…, astonished).

All of these little things together make for an engaging review that the reader wants to read fully and thoroughly.

Conclusion/Recommendation

To finish your review you need a conclusion in which you summarise what you’ve written up to this point and make a recommendation to the reader. After all, that’s why we read reviews in the first place – we want someone to tell us about a product or an experience and see if they would recommend it or not.

There is some specific language that you should incorporate when you make a recommendation because you want to persuade the reader and make the examiner happy:

Nothing crazy, but you want to cover all the bases.

All in all, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom gives some incredible insight into the life of one of the world’s most famous and influential personalities of the 20th century. It would be a shame not to watch it so I highly recommend that you check your favourite streaming service or buy the film as soon as you can and I promise you won’t regret it.

You see that it is very much straightforward. The first sentence recaps what I like about the film and the second one makes a recommendation and tries to persuade the reader (“I promise you won’t regret it.”).

How your review is marked

The marking scheme in C1 Advanced is pretty complex and there are a lot of things for the examiner to consider when checking your review. For this reason, I decided to write an article about how the writing paper in CAE is marked and you check it out by following the link below.

Now it is up to you

Take the advice in this article and start practising reviews. With more experience it will become easier and easier for you and when the official exam comes around, you will be ready.

Шаблон: как писать ревью/отзыв на английском

Нет времени? Сохрани в

Продолжаем нашу непостоянную рубрику how-to-write. В этой статье научимся писать ревью, рецензию и обзор фильма на английском по шаблону.

Для каких целей пишется ревью

Отзыв можно написать, по сути, на что угодно. На школу английского, на язык, на жизнь в конце концов.

Мы же затронем только три типа review: короткий неформальный отзыв (например, на товар), любительский обзор на фильм и профессиональную рецензию на книгу. От этого и будем отталкиваться.

В конце будет шаблон и набор полезных слов. А пока нам еще нужно прояснить некоторые моменты.

7 лексических игр на уроках английского

Разница между review, overview и critique

Review — критическая оценка произведения (например, книги или фильма). В ревью можно описать свои впечатления, поделиться эмоциями, посоветовать или не посоветовать произведение к прочтению/просмотру. Хотя, отзыв может быть и на что-то другое. Например, отзыв на приложение в AppStore — тоже review.

Overview — общий обзор, краткое изложение. Это скорее не отзыв, а краткий пересказ. Тут мы непредвзято пересказываем содержание и основную мысль, давая читателю самому решить, хочет ли он это смотреть/читать или же нет.

Critique — почти то же самое, что и review, но критика может быть написана только автором. Например, один писатель пишет critique на другого. А если этим занимается обычный читатель, даже если он большой ценитель литературы и считает себя экспертом, это будет просто review.

Какой стандартный объем ревью на английском

Шаблон отзыва на английском (review template)

Используйте структуру из таблички.

I ordered this product in your store. I’ve been waiting for a week, and you still haven’t delivered it.
Я заказала этот товар в вашем магазине. Я прождала уже неделю, а вы до сих пор его не доставили.

I have been waiting for a long time for this GPU to be available. And finally I got it. Now I want to share my emotions with those who are just planning to buy.
Я долго ждал, пока эта видеокарта появится в наличии. Теперь она наконец у меня. Теперь я хочу поделиться эмоциями с теми, кто только планирует покупку.

This dishwasher washes dishes well. Just like it supposed to.
Посудомойка хорошо моет посуду. Как и должна.

This book isn’t trivial, unlike most motivational literature.
Эта книга не была банальной, как большая часть мотивационной литературы.

Everything was fine for the first two weeks. Then it broke.
Все было хорошо первые две недели. Потом оно сломалось.

I learned nothing. This is not a textbook, this is just a collection of incoherent exercises.
Я не узнал ничего нового. Это не учебник, это просто набор несвязных упражнений.

Don’t watch it if your IQ is more than 40
Не смотрите это, если ваш айкью больше 40.

This was incredible. I wish I could erase my memory to read it again.
Это было волшебно. Я хотела бы стереть память, чтобы прочитать это еще раз.

Not bad. 4/5.
Неплохо. 4 из 5.

To sum up, 3/5.Could be better.
Подводя итог, 3 из 5. Могло быть и лучше.

This story is about an orphan girl who loved to play chess.
Эта история — о девочка-сироте, которая любила играть в шахматы.

The action takes place in the middle of the 18th century somewhere in France.
Действия происходят в середине 18 века где-то во Франции.

I think this is the best melodrama of the decade. Let me convince you of this
Я думаю, это лучшая мелодрама десятилетия. Позвольте мне убедить вас в этом.

The film captures the atmosphere of the time well.
Фильм хорошо передает атмосферу того времени.

This film won an Oscar for Best Picture of 2014.
Этот фильм взял Оскар как лучший фильм 2014 года.

The film is based on the book of the same name.
Фильм основан на одноименной книге.

This is one of the TOP-10 most expensive movies ever.
Это один из ТОП-10 самых дорогих фильмов в истории.

The confrontation between hero and antihero is highlighted by color balance.
Конфронтация героя с антигероем подчеркивается цветовым балансом.

The actor gained 10 kilos to get the role.
Актер набрал 10 килограм, чтобы заполучить роль.

The most scary thing about this film is that this is all real.
Самое страшное во всем фильме то, что все это было реально.

Now this is definitely one of my favorite horrors.
Теперь это определенно один из моих любимых хорроров.

This is a success as a work of art and as a product for a mass audience too.
Это успех, и как художественное произведение, и как продукт для масс тоже.

This is an absolute failure. This is not only my opinion — it can be seen from the ratings.
Это абсолютный провал. Это не только мое мнение — это видно из рейтингов.

I highly recommend watching this for those who love the feeling of nostalgia.
Я горячо рекомендую посмотреть это тем, кто любит ощущение ностальгии.

An extremely powerful story of a strong girl.
Невероятно мощная история о сильной девочке.

It completely blew my mind.
Это полностью перевернуло мое сознание.

It’s 1960’s in the United States of America.
Действия происходят в 1960-х в Соединенных Штатах.

The Narrator meets unique personalities, whose views intertwine with his own.
Рассказчик встречает несколько уникальных людей, чьи взгляды переплетаются с его собственными.

The novel begins strangely and then becomes even more incomprehensible.
Роман начинается странно, и далее становится еще более непонятным.

I don’t want to sound harsh, but it’s very hard to read. It’s really exhausting.
Я не хочу показаться резким, но это действительно тяжело читать. Это действительно выматывает.

It’s hard to surprise an experienced critic when it comes to plot. But this book is exceptional.
Опытного критика сложно чем-то удивить в плане сюжета. Но эта книга уникальна.

I recognized myself in Richard.
Я узнал себя в Ричарде.

Too much hype for such a run-of-the-mill romance.
Слишком много шумихи для такого заурядного романа.

Definitely one of the most underrated books in modern literature.
Определенно, одна из самых недооцененных книг в современной литературе.

Слова и фразы, которые вам пригодятся

Хорошая оценка:

Прочитать, просмотреть или изучить — разные типы чтения в английском

Рекомендации

Это все. Теперь вы знаете, как писать ревью на английском, будь то отзыв или рецензия. Готовы попрактиковаться? Попробуйте написать на нее отзыв в комментариях ниже.

EnglishDom #вдохновляемвыучить

Review How to write in English! Film and book review in English

Have you so that Movies and advertised the new prime minister next blockbuster did not bring you anything but a sense of bitter disappointment? It should soon swallow the unpleasant aftertaste of wasted time lost and forget mistakes of the director and the actors miserable game, like a bad dream. While there were and there are movies that could still affect the deepest depths of your soul and you want to tell everyone about these films. In Russian there is an amazing array of words and phrases that help us put down on paper all that hurricane of emotions that is gripping us after watching a movie or reading a book, but when it comes to the English language, the only interesting and, at best, exciting and wonderful arrive to mind. With this we must fight, my friends!

Content Review

When you are about to read a new book or go to the movies, how do you know that there are films and books the time spent on them? Of course, from the Review! In the narrow sense of the word «Review» — a review, your personal assessment of what you have seen, read or visited.

As with any kind of works at the Review has the structure:

In the introduction, as a rule, they report that a product has been selected for the Review, why this work, which made write a review. Especially a lot of writing in early makes no sense, it should be 2-3 sentences that tell what will be discussed.

The most interesting is in the main part, you can give free rein to their imagination. In this part of the show, who is in the lead roles and play any character, and it would be good to combine it with the events of the film. But do not get carried away and to retell the whole story, do not forget that your Review can read a person who has not seen the movie or read the book do not, you run the risk of insulting nickname «spoiler» — from English to spoil — port. It’s such a nasty person who spoils all the fun of a movie or a book by retelling the story.

Speaking of the story (plot). Although you do not need to describe the whole story, though the component parts you need:

In conclusion, every self-respecting connoisseur of literature and cinema writing, whether the movie / book view / read and summarize the «why.»

Example Review

We will not shelve and immediately turn to the example of Review of the film, which I love very much, — «The Hunger Games» («The Hunger Games»). By the way, fans of the genre will appreciate the dystopian book Susan Collins «The Hunger Games», based on which the film was made.

The author pointed out all the main points of Review, right? I started with that said, what movie to choose and why. The following describes the major twists and turns of the plot, the main characters, conflict and conflict resolution. And most importantly — have their attitude to the film, which he liked, and that was strange. After that concluded — is worth watching or not. It is a good example of Review with an excellent vocabulary, which we will present in the plate.

Useful phrases to write Review

Well, now we know what the structural elements to be mentioned in his book. However, this is not the most difficult, the big question arises from the choice of words! How beautiful to describe all that feeling into words? This question torments many. Let’s dwell on words and phrases that can be used in describing the movies or books. But first — the most popular genres of movies.

Genres of films
Genre of film	Film genre	Example
Action	Action
Drama	Drama
Comedy	Comedy
Romantic comedy	Romantic comedy
Horror	Horror
Science fiction	Fantastic
Suspense (Thriller)	Thriller
Western	Western
Documentary (Non-Fiction)	Documentary
Musical	Musical

After following types of movie genres of films, and here we highlight the following:

But the adjectives we can use when describing films and books:

I also want to give a summary table, listing adjectives describing positive and negative aspects of the film:

Common phrases to describe the film. A film can …

Do you want to recommend a movie for viewing or book reading for? Let’s do it this way:

As you can see, the options to describe books and movies, there are many incredible and interesting word can now be safely forgotten. This language can be used not only during the writing of the Review, but just in conversation, describing his impressions of the work of art. In addition, many international exams in English language has a writing assignment — write a Review (FCE, CAE, CPE). To successfully write Review written part of the exam, you can safely take and memorize a phrase from the article.

And finally, we offer you to take the test to secure the material on which we focused in this article:

How To Write An A-Grade Literature Review:

3 Straightforward Steps (Plus Templates & Examples)

Quality research is about building onto the existing work of others, “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as Newton put it. The literature review chapter of your dissertation or thesis is where you synthesise this prior work and lay the foundation for your own research. It’s no surprise then that it’s a critically important chapter.

In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to write a literature review in three straightforward steps, so you can conquer this vital chapter (the smart way).

But first, the “why”…

Before we get started on HOW to write the literature review chapter, we’ve got to look at the WHY. To put it bluntly, if you don’t understand the real purpose of this chapter, there’s no way you can pull it off well.

So, what exactly is the purpose of the literature review process? There are at least four core functions:

Most students understand the first point but don’t give any thought to the rest. To get the most from the literature review process, you must keep all four points front of mind as you review the literature (more on this,
shortly), or you’ll land up with a wonky foundation.

Right – with the WHY out the way, let’s move on to the HOW. As mentioned above, writing your literature review is a process, which I’ll break down into three steps:

Importantly, you must complete steps one and two before you start writing up your chapter. I know it’s very tempting, but don’t try to kill two birds with one stone and write as you read. You’ll invariably end up wasting huge amounts of time re-writing and re-shaping, or you’ll just land up with a disjointed, hard to digest mess. Instead, you need to read first and distil the information, then plan and execute the writing. Trust me on this one!

Overview:
How To Write A Literature Review

Step 1: Find the relevant literature

Naturally, the first step in the literature review journey is to hunt down the existing research that’s relevant to your topic. While you probably already have a decent base of this from your research proposal, you need to expand on this substantially in the dissertation or thesis itself. Essentially, you need to be looking for any existing literature that potentially helps you answer your research question (or develop it, if that’s not yet pinned down). So, you need to put on your hunting cap.

There are numerous ways to find relevant literature, but I’ll cover my top four tactics here. I’d suggest combining all four methods to ensure that nothing slips past you:

Method 1 – Google Scholar Scrubbing

Google’s academic search engine, Google Scholar, is a great starting point as it provides a good high-level view of the relevant journal articles for whatever keyword you throw at it. Most valuably, it tells you how many times each article has been cited, which gives you an idea of how credible (or at least, popular) it is. Some articles will be free to access, while others will require an account, which brings us to the next method.

Method 2 – University Database Scrounging

Generally, universities provide students with access to an online library, which provides access to many (but not all) of the major journals.

So, if you find an article using Google Scholar that requires paid access (which is quite likely), search for that article in your university’s database – if it’s listed there, you’ll have access. Note that, generally, the search engine capabilities of these databases are poor, so make sure you search for the exact article name, or you might not find it.

Method 3 – Journal Article Snowballing

At the end of every academic journal article, you’ll find a list of references. As with any academic writing, these references are the building blocks of the article, so if the article is relevant to your topic, there’s a good chance a portion of the referenced works will be too. Do a quick scan of the titles and see what seems relevant, then search for the relevant ones in your university’s database.

Method 4 – Dissertation Scavenging

Similar to Method 3 above, you can leverage other students’ dissertations. All you have to do is skim through literature review chapters of existing dissertations related to your topic and you’ll find a gold mine of potential literature. Usually, your university will provide you with access to previous students’ dissertations, but you can also find a much larger selection in the following databases:

Keep in mind that dissertations and theses are not as academically sound as published, peer-reviewed journal articles (because they’re written by students, not professionals), so be sure to check the credibility of any sources you find using this method. You can do this by assessing the citation count of any given article in Google Scholar. If you need help with assessing the credibility of any article, or with finding relevant research in general, you can chat with one of our Research Specialists.

Alright – with a good base of literature firmly under your belt, it’s time to move onto the next step.

Need a helping hand?

See how Grad Coach can help you.

Step 2: Log, catalogue and synthesise

Once you’ve built a little treasure trove of articles, it’s time to get reading and start digesting the information – what does it all mean?

While I present steps one and two (hunting and digesting) as sequential, in reality, it’s more of a back and forth tango – you’ll read a little, then have an idea, spot a new citation, or a new potential variable, and then go back to searching for articles. This is perfectly natural – through the reading process, your thoughts will develop, new avenues might crop up, directional adjustments might arise. This is, after all, one of the main purposes of the literature review process (i.e. to familiarise yourself with the current state of research in your field).

As you’re working through your treasure chest, it’s essential that you simultaneously start organising the information. There are three aspects to this:

I’ll discuss each of these below:

2.1 – Log the reference information

As you read each article, you should add it to your reference management software. I usually recommend Mendeley for this purpose (see the Mendeley 101 video below), but you can use whichever software you’re comfortable with. Most importantly, make sure you load EVERY article you read into your reference manager, even if it doesn’t seem very relevant at the time.

2.2 – Build an organised catalogue

In the beginning, you might feel confident that you can remember who said what, where, and what their main arguments were. Trust me, you won’t. If you do a thorough review of the relevant literature (as you must!), you’re going to read many, many articles, and it’s simply impossible to remember who said what, when, and in what context. Also, without the bird’s eye view that a catalogue provides, you’ll miss connections between various articles, and have no view of how the research developed over time. Simply put, it’s essential to build your own catalogue of the literature.

I would suggest using Excel to build your catalogue, as it allows you to run filters, colour code and sort – all very useful when your list grows large (which it will). How you lay your spreadsheet out is up to you, but I’d suggest you have the following columns (at minimum):

If you’d like, you can try out our free catalog template here (see screenshot below).

2.3 – Digest and synthesise

Most importantly, as you work through the literature and build your catalogue, you need to synthesise all the information in your own mind – how does it all fit together? Look for links between the various articles and try to develop a bigger picture view of the state of the research. Some important questions to ask yourself are:

To help you develop a big-picture view and synthesise all the information, you might find mind mapping software such as Freemind useful. Alternatively, if you’re a fan of physical note-taking, investing in a large whiteboard might work for you.

Step 3: Outline and write it up!

Once you’re satisfied that you have digested and distilled all the relevant literature in your mind, it’s time to put pen to paper (or rather, fingers to keyboard). There are two steps here – outlining and writing:

3.1 – Draw up your outline

Having spent so much time reading, it might be tempting to just start writing up without a clear structure in mind. However, it’s critically important to decide on your structure and develop a detailed outline before you write anything. Your literature review chapter needs to present a clear, logical and an easy to follow narrative – and that requires some planning. Don’t try to wing it!

Naturally, you won’t always follow the plan to the letter, but without a detailed outline, you’re more than likely going to end up with a disjointed pile of waffle, and then you’re going to spend a far greater amount of time re-writing, hacking and patching. The adage, “measure twice, cut once” is very suitable here.

In terms of structure, the first decision you’ll have to make is whether you’ll lay out your review thematically (into themes) or chronologically (by date/period). The right choice depends on your topic, research objectives and research questions, which we discuss in this article.

Once that’s decided, you need to draw up an outline of your entire chapter in bullet point format. Try to get as detailed as possible, so that you know exactly what you’ll cover where, how each section will connect to the next, and how your entire argument will develop throughout the chapter. Also, at this stage, it’s a good idea to allocate rough word count limits for each section, so that you can identify word count problems before you’ve spent weeks or months writing!

PS – you can download a copy of our literature review chapter template to help you structure your chapter.

3.2 – Get writing

With a detailed outline at your side, it’s time to start writing up (finally!). At this stage, it’s common to feel a bit of writer’s block and find yourself procrastinating under the pressure of finally having to put something on paper. To help with this, remember that the objective of the first draft is not perfection – it’s simply to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper, after which you can refine them. The structure might change a little, the word count allocations might shift and shuffle, you might add or remove a section – that’s all okay. Don’t worry about all this on your first draft – just get your thoughts down on paper.

Once you’ve got a full first draft (however rough it may be), step away from it for a day or two (longer if you can) and then come back at it with fresh eyes. Pay particular attention to the flow and narrative – does it fall fit together and flow from one section to another smoothly? Now’s the time to try to improve the linkage from each section to the next, tighten up the writing to be more concise, trim down word count and sand it down into a more digestible read.

Once you’ve done that, give your writing to a friend or colleague who is not a subject matter expert and ask them if they understand the overall discussion. The best way to assess this is to ask them to explain the chapter back to you. This technique will give you a strong indication of which points were clearly communicated and which weren’t. If you’re working with Grad Coach, this is a good time to have your Research Specialist review your chapter.

Recap: How to write a literature review

In this article, we’ve covered how to research and write up a winning literature review chapter. Let’s do a quick recap of the key points: