collegestudent9
May 21, 2007
Essays / Can't figure out how to tackle this (literature review) [2]
I'm a freshman and I've been assigned to do an essay that is to be a mininum of 25 pages. We were asked to submit our topic proposals a few weeks ago and I believe I unintentionally have screwed myself over. The more research I do on my topic the worse it gets, there is too much to sift through! There are literally thousands of journals articles on the topic and each one I read just adds another layer of complexity. I feel like no one single author agrees with the author, they just grab bits of each others work and try and propose some new model or theory that slightly varies from the dozen that already exist in hopes of making a career for themselves as an academic!
How in the hell do you put together a literature review in a reasonable amount of time? How does this process not literally take hundreds of hours? You have to read hundreds of articles each of which are about as long as the paper you intend to write. Evaluate which ones are relevent to your topic, then pick those apart so you're not plagarizing and take in depth notes on them, and then finally write the damn thing! Or do you just randomely grab 25-30 articles that vaguely complement the others and put together some worthless paper that ultimately contributes nothing of value to you, are the field you're interested in, and hope for the best in terms of a grade? There is a draft of this damn thing due at the end of the week, there is just too much information!
I'm a freshman and I've been assigned to do an essay that is to be a mininum of 25 pages. We were asked to submit our topic proposals a few weeks ago and I believe I unintentionally have screwed myself over. The more research I do on my topic the worse it gets, there is too much to sift through! There are literally thousands of journals articles on the topic and each one I read just adds another layer of complexity. I feel like no one single author agrees with the author, they just grab bits of each others work and try and propose some new model or theory that slightly varies from the dozen that already exist in hopes of making a career for themselves as an academic!
How in the hell do you put together a literature review in a reasonable amount of time? How does this process not literally take hundreds of hours? You have to read hundreds of articles each of which are about as long as the paper you intend to write. Evaluate which ones are relevent to your topic, then pick those apart so you're not plagarizing and take in depth notes on them, and then finally write the damn thing! Or do you just randomely grab 25-30 articles that vaguely complement the others and put together some worthless paper that ultimately contributes nothing of value to you, are the field you're interested in, and hope for the best in terms of a grade? There is a draft of this damn thing due at the end of the week, there is just too much information!
