2010 TAA Conference on Text and Academic Authoring

Ramada Mall of America Minneapolis, Minnesota

June 24-26, 2010

Academic Session:

William Waters

Scholarly Writing: Strengthening Your Literature Review

Day/Time: Friday, 2:15 - 3:15 p.m.

Presenter: Dr. William Waters, an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, and coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation

You've written a literature review before — perhaps many, many times. But are you happy with the process and results? Most scholars aren't. Perhaps you have a method that works to compile and synthesize the relevant literature, but what you write is a tedious list of studies that readers are likely to skip over. Or perhaps you sit at your desk facing several huge piles of books and several piles of articles asking yourself "How am I supposed to begin to tackle and process all of this material? Isn't there a more useful way to organize a literature review?" Even if you felt like you could get through it, how are you supposed to keep track of everything you read? How will you synthesize it and put it all together?

Waters will share a method you can use that will make processing and writing your literature review efficient and manageable. It is also a method that allows you to make connections among your literature in an original and unique way — connections that elevate the quality of your thesis, dissertation, or articles. There's an added bonus, too. After you've completed the process, the literature review almost writes itself.

This session will cover:

• The purpose of the literature review
• Identifying the literature to review
• Coding the literature
• Creating a conceptual schema for your literature review
• Writing it up

About the Presenter:

William Waters is an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. His research and teaching interests are in writing theory and practice, the history of the English language, linguistics, and modern grammar. He is the coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation and was the managing editor of La Puerta: A Doorway into the Academy. He also has published several poems in national journals. Dr. Waters earned his Ph.D. in language and linguistics from the University of New Mexico and previously taught at the University of Maine; University College in Galway, Ireland; and Cheongbuk National University in Korea.