I'm working on my PhD nonetheless. Here was a meditation of mine on the Literature Review that is relevant here:
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Academic literature (AL) predates the social media (SM) of recent decades.
AL identifies and preserves human knowledge across time, space, language, andexperience level.
These implicit "goals" contrast with SM's emphasis on the present moment, colloquial focus, idiomatic word choice, and general disregard for larger context beyond the.
Therefore, when engaged in producing AL, a detached mindset seems helpful.
One enters a discourse with people across the ages who were soberly adding to the sum of human knowledge, not pursuing SM "likes", and not regressing to the mean of some Artificial Intelligence corpus.
AL seeks to cover the prior art, to honor those who came before, to minimize duplication of effort, and to filter the "novelty" out of ideas by detailing their pedigree.
The writing style of AL targets a reader half a century in the future of unknown gender, nationality, and depth within either the topic or with the English language itself.
Therefore, the writing style needs to favor:
- Simplicity in word choice. Archaic words or definitions, however valid, are not preferred. Two or three shorter words is often easier on that unknown reader.
- Linearity in development. No dramatic tension. Set the ideas in front of the reader and move through them in order.
- Connectedness. The chain of the ideas is obvious as we move from one to the next, so that reiterating to remember the current topic is less necessary.
- Cohesiveness. A paragraph should almost stand on its own, because it contains enough information to make its point even if quoted within another article.