organizing for themes
Organizing for Themes
Once you have collected and evaluated the relevant studies on your topic, you need to think how best to present the information in a way that captures the common themes you have found. What multiple discrete themes emerged from your review? You will need to determine these categories and concepts or themes you think are important to understanding your topic and defining your research problem. Consider what ideas surfaced across your studies and how the content from these studies can fit within some higher-level themes based on the focus of your own research. Even after you have grouped ideas and determined themes, you will need to decide how to order them in a way that makes your argument for your research problem compelling. These themes will eventually be the structure of your literature review.
In this Discussion, you will begin to organize the content from the ten articles of your annotated bibliography (Parts 1, 2, and 3) into themes, which will then constitute the basis for your research problem. (See this week’s Assignment for more details on Part 3.)
To prepare for this Discussion:
- Begin to organize your 10 articles (from Weeks 3, 7, and 8) into topics that trace your argument, as described in Chapter 8, “Synthesizing Literature Prior to Writing a Review†(pp. 73–80), in the Galvan text.
- The topics should demonstrate that your argument is worthwhile and justified, leading to the gap in the literature.
- Review the web resource “Integrating Arguments in Paragraphs.â€
- Review the following media pieces:
- Synthesis and Thesis Development
- Adding Analysis and Synthesis to Your Writing
- Reviewing the Literature and Incorporating Previous Research
- Literature Review Panel with the Library and Writing Center
Post by Day 3 a list of your themes, and explain how these topics relate to the gap in the literature you identified.