The Laundry List Lit Review

My local PhD advisor told me off for giving my power away in my writing by starting off a paragraph with "X says, and Y says", simply listing all the contributors to a field, ad nauseam. He was so right. Now that I know I do that, I am working hard on not doing it.

To the left is one piece of writing to roughly illustrate what I mean. On the left of the accompanying image is the "laundry list style". On the right of the image is the rewrite (which you can see needs more content to build argument yet), but you can see a different 'shape' forming in the way it is written. The way of writing means we don't lead with "Daft (2008) defines...". Instead we think about what we really want to say about what Daft told us, and what it means for our own argument and application of the idea. How Daft's knowledge contributes to our understanding of this concept. So we drop the quote, and talk about what the thing is that Daft wrote about. In this case it was about what mental models are, and how we use them. In my second paragraph, I am trying to give some history of the concept, but it is confusing. I had to ask myself if the reader really needed to know that. They didn't, so I chopped it.

What I was doing is what Professor Pat Thomson calls a the Laundry List (!) way of writing a Literature Review. The "Patter" blog post on avoiding the laundry list literature review will help all of us to restructure our work to let our potential contribution shine through in our writing. It is a five star must-read (here).

Phew: but avoiding the laundry list makes writing harder. First I write the laundry list, because that is how I build argument. Then I have to rewrite the laundry list to say what I want to say. I need a new way to start writing!!!!

As my advisor pointed out, writing the non-laundry list way shows our confidence. It shows that we are exploring the field and starting to find our own ideas. We need to demonstrate that we are, as explorers, familiar enough with our territory to start making meaning from the contributions of others, and staking out our own niche. Not through unevidenced statements, but by carefully thought-through argument.

Hard work. But much better reading!


Sam

• Reference: Thomson, P. (11 September 2017). Avoiding the laundry list literature review. Retrieved 19 September 2017 from https://patthomson.net/2017/09/11/avoiding-the-laundry-list-literature-review/