Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book is focused on the writing of literature reviews, a difficult genre to master and one that is typically not addressed at the undergraduate or graduate levels. The content for the book is driven through exercises and activities that facilitate the writing progress. Grounded in English (composition, rhetoric, and writing studies), engineering education, and technical communication research, this book teaches writing from a genre theory lens. This lens allows writers to focus on how the purpose of sentences or paragraphs interacts with the other content and with the disciplinary expectations for writing for specific audiences. The text is organized so that readers can customize their learning pace. The authors outline how readers can write an effective LR as part of a 2-day workshop or within a 2-, 8-, or 16-week period. This scalable model makes the text ideal for independent learning or as part of a graduate writing workshop.
Synopsis
Is a literature review looming in your future? Are you procrastinating on writing a literature review at this very moment? If so, this is the book for you. Writing often causes trepidation and procrastination for engineering students--issues that compound while writing a literature review, a type of academic writing most engineers are never formally taught. Consider this workbook as a "couch-to-5k" program for engineering writers rather than runners: if you complete the activities in this book from beginning to end, you will have a literature review draft ready for revision and content editing by your research advisor.
So, You Have to Write a Literature Review presents a dynamic and practical method in which engineering students--typically late-career undergraduates or graduate students--can learn to write literature reviews, and translate genre-based writing instruction into easy-to-follow, bite-sized activities and content. Written in a refreshingly conversational style while acknowledging that writing is quite difficult, Catherine Berdanier and Joshua Lenart leverage their unique disciplinary backgrounds with decades of experience teaching academic engineering writing in this user-friendly workbook