Guidelines for Writing a First Draft

Up to this point) you have searched for literature on the topic of your review) made careful notes on specific details of the literature, and analyzed these details to identify patterns, relationships among studies, and gaps in the body of literature, as well as strengths and weaknesses in particular research studies. Then, in Chapter 8, you reorganized your notes and developed a detailed writing outline as you prepared to write your literature review. In other words, you have already completed the most difficult steps in the writing process: the analysis and synthesis of the literature and the charting of the course of your argument. These preliminary steps constitute the intellectual process of preparing a literature review. The remaining steps-drafting, editing, and redrafting-will now require you to translate the results of your intellectuallabor into a narrative account of what you have found. The guidelines in this chapter will help you to produce a first draft of your literature review. The guidelines in Chapter 10 will help you to develop a coherent essay and avoid producing a series of annotations, and Chapter 11 presents additional guidelines that relate to style, mechanics, and language usage.