Galvan - Writing literature reviews: a guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences

The following features make this book unique among textbooks designed to teach analytical writing:

Many colleges and universities have adopted writing across the curriculum programs, in which students are required to write papers in all courses. While the goals of such programs are admirable, many instructors are pressed for time to cover just the traditional content of their courses, leaving them with little time to teach writing. Such instructors will find this book useful because the explicit steps in the writing process are illustrated with examples throughout, making it possible for students to use it largely on their own. In addition, many professors naturally write well but have given little thought toand have no training inhow to teach writing. As a supplement, this book solves that dilemma by providing a detailed guide to the writing process.

Much of what most of us know about writing was learned through what Kamhi-Stein (1997) calls the one-shot writing assignment (p. 52). This is where the instructor gives an assignment at the beginning of the term, using the prompt, Write a paper about <specific topic>. Conceptually, we tend to view this type of assignment as a single task, even though students may go through several discrete steps in the process of completing it. In fact, when one is writing papers that involve library research, the quality of the finished product depends in large measure on the care with which one undertakes each of these steps.

In this book, the activities at the end of each chapter guide students through these various steps of the writing process. These activities can be recast as a series of tasks that can easily be incorporated into the syllabus of a survey course in a specific discipline as a multistep writing assignment. Thus, this book has two complementary audiences: (a) instructors who may want to incorporate this multistep writing approach into their course syllabus and (b) students, working independently, who may need help in planning and implementing the various stages involved in completing a major writing assignment, such as the literature review chapter of a thesis or dissertation.