Reviewing Literature

One of the reasons it took me so long to finish my thesis was I always procrastinated on the Review of Related Literature. I always though of it as an immense and insurmountable task. I thought I had to read scores of articles and several books, and fill out a matrix summarizing arguments and evidence before I could say I was done. It was always hardest to begin, more so when the task before seems never ending.

So I did everything except begin. I photocopied more and more articles and books from the library. I read books about method and I read Hart's Doing a Literature Review. It was a good, but rather expensive, book. It taught me to challenge my sources, and to create a review that thematically arranged my sources in support of establishing a research gap, instead of simply arranging them chronologically. Yet it got me no closer to starting by Review. It was not a book, but a boy named Magnus that finally jolted me enough to finish my thesis in a matter of weeks.