Assignment: Draft 1.1
Purpose: To demonstrate your ability to review and analyze research
Description: Most writers, in the academic setting and beyond, review previous research as part of their own writing. How they do this reviewing differs, though, across different academic disciplines and rhetorical situations. Your task for this assignment is to compare Martin Alexander’s review essay pp. 556-63 with that from another discipline to create a guide and create an analysis of the features of a literature review. Your analysis should focus on how and why literature reviews are written. Keep in mind that this type of writing may be called a literature review, an analytical literature review, a research review, or simply a review essay. Different fields have different names for an essay that reviews scholarship or research on a topic.
Select an academic discipline that is or might be your major, and locate a literature review for that field.
1. Read the essay through once so that you understand its scope and the author’s argument. Then, analyze how the author crafted the review. How does the author group research on similar topics? What information about the research does the author provide? How does the author arrange the essay? What is the rhetorical effect of that arrangement? What is the author’s reason for reviewing this body of research?
2. Determine the most interesting or important points of similarity and contrast between the chemistry review essay and the review essay in your discipline.
3. Write an analysis of the features of a literature review. In this analysis, you will consider how a literature review is written.
For this essay, you must
o Include the bibliographic information on the literature review essay you chose.
o Section One: Include your analysis of the literature review essay you have chosen. Take the approach that your audience has not read the essay. You will need to provide them with enough details and examples so that they will understand your analysis. Remember, though, that you are not analyzing the content of the essay but rather the structure of the essay. The primary focus in analysis is on structure.
o Section Two: Include your comparison of Alexander’s essay and the review essay you have chosen.
o Section Three: Create an analysis of the elements of the literature review essay as a genre. In this analysis, you should not only explain what is to be done when writing literature reviews, but explain why something should be done. You will be using this to guide you in writing your own literature review, so you need to be as thorough as possible. This draft will ask you to explain how a literature review essay is written. In the next draft, you will demonstrate how by actually writing one.
Minimum length: 1500 words
Format: MLA style for internal citations and works cited.