Because all issues involve multiple perspectives, you must locate a wide range of sources to understand each perspective fairly and thoughtfully. To that end, you will write a literature review using at least four sources, at least three of which must be academic—that is, academic articles or published scholarly books. All non-scholarly sources should also be from a reliable source (such as The New York Times). The sources used should cover a range of viewpoints, perspectives, and positions about your topic—the goal is to get as many different viewpoints as possible.
Your goal is to inform your readers about the existing information and points of view on your research question. Remember: I have not read all your research, nor have your classmates. You can assume a reasonably well-educated audience who is not intimately familiar with your topic; you’ll need to give an appropriate amount of background information, but you won’t have to explain common terms or ideas.
Getting started: In order to find the best sources, you will need to read more than the four that will eventually be included in your literature review. You will probably want to skim the articles/read abstracts to identify likely sources, then read potentially useful sources more closely. Finally, you will need to make notes on your readings to annotate the five best/most useful sources.
Drafting the Essay: Rather than going source by source, as a bibliography does, a literature review moves idea by idea. That is, you must identify important ideas related to your research question and show the ways your sources overlap or contradict one another on those points to give a unified, coherent overview of the various positions, studies, and points of view on your chosen topic and research question. In order to write the literature review, you’ll need to think about the main ideas of your sources and the ways they overlap—which sources corroborate or support one another, which contradict each other, which pieces complicate and add complexity to another. You’ll want to choose a logical organizational structure and use both in-text citations and attributive tags to differentiate between your different sources.
Requirements:
500-750 words
Includes information from 4 sources
At least 3 academic
Any others must be reliable
Uses in-text MLA citation AND a works cited page