Summer vacations are practically over for most of the college students. So what now? How will you recharge yourself during the summer? Well, summer is the best time to start re-energizing for the year ahead in college. It’s the perfect time to reflect on what you learned the in the past academic year. Here are a few things you can consider to recharge your body, spirit and mind in summer.

Move more

A college student like you has to spend a lot of time in front of the computer screen, looking through spreadsheets and completing all the assignments. All that will not go away even when it’s really hot outside. The best way to deal with the stress and work that comes along with assignments is to move your body. Sitting all day is not good for the body. It needs you to move in order to improve the health and make your mind alert. Have a small dance party every now and then. Walk to the nearest bus stop or schedule small breaks after 40 to 60 minutes. Go outside for a run and enjoy the warm weather. Early studies and movement will increase your brain power.

Read a book for Pleasure

Clear your mind with a book that is outside your field of study. It will help you gain a fresh perspective to start the new semester at college. You will be able to tackle work in a different way. Also, knowing what is going on around the world, outside college is also good. It will make you well aware and a decent professional. Take a break and go to the nearest bookstore and enjoy a good book.

Do something new in your life

New experiences make us happy. It is even more satisfying than buying new things. The memory of a new experience remains with us for a long time. So, shake up your routine a little bit and take a break from college papers. Appreciate the beauty of new adventures to get out of the rut. Take a drive to someplace you have never been before or eat lunch at some place new. It’s even better if you are spontaneous, take a day trip and you will be amazed about what you will experience.

Be Grateful for the things around you

Recharge yourself during the summer by reflecting on the things you are grateful for. It generally reminds us what’s important in life. Take it a step further and tell the people around you how grateful you are to have them in your life.  Even the business journals like Harvard Review also suggest college students to do this.

Don’t lose hope on the amount of information out there on your topic. Literature research may seem like a lot of information that will make you drown in quicksand. Getting through this chunk of information is indeed a huge task but if you plan it, you can get rid of that problem, one bit at a time.

To help you get through all that information in small sizes, we have compiled an easy plan for you to follow.

Step 1: What do you want to find out?

Do you have a research question ready or are you looking for information to make your research question strong? Before you start reading all the relevant information, make up your mind about what you are researching for. If you are at the stage of exploring a topic or a subject, then state the purpose of your research as “understanding the basic ideas of topic ABC”. If you are looking for opposing theories on the effect of event A on event B, then write it down clearly.

Having a clear perspective and goal will help you find the right information at this step of the research. You will begin to notice that reading for different goals for your research will help you focus on various aspects of publication.

Step 2: How much time do you have on your hands?

You can spend the whole day or just 20 minutes on the entire paper. If you really want to manage your time in the best possible way, then give you work a structure. Plan the work by giving yourself deadlines.

Once you are aware how much time do you have on your hands, start planning. If you have a month for the entire research, take 1.5 weeks to go through the essentials, 1 week to explore the sidelines of your research and 1 week to write a literature review.

Step 3: Study the essentials

Identify the key publications of your study. A good way to start is to find an authentic and a detailed review paper or a report. Start the topic by chewing on the references on that paper or report.

To understand the basics of the new subject, you need to spend some time on it. Understand the basic equations and principles of that study. All this will require sitting down, noting down important points and slowly working your way through all the relevant material. The process will be similar to a student going through a difficult chapter of a textbook. You may find yourself spending too much time on the some papers. However, they will build the foundation of your research along with further readings.

Step 4: Speed through the Sidelines

Separate all the papers that you find interesting, give additional insights but are not relevant to the field of study. Note that these papers are not of lesser importance, you can’t skip the side information. You have to understand all the concepts spend less time in order to understand all the elements.

The key is to go through everything in a quick manner. It will be like speed-reading through everything. Train the eyes to look at a group of words rather than looking at a single word at a time.

Step 5: Archive what you read

Reading is important but finding that paper and looking for more information is a vital aspect in controlling the large chunk of information over the time.

You can keep a digital archive or archive hard copies. Arrange your document in such a way that you are able to find those papers even after three years.

Step 6: Keep an eye on the outcome

Don’t rely on information and results available when you first researching on a topic. What appeared to be the truth yesterday may not remain the same with today’s results. Develop a strategy to keep your research updated in order to maintain the best outcome. Subscribe to the publication updates of the relevant journals and set up RSS feed on relevant keywords.

Every graduate student experiences the feeling of a project going on forever. There is no end date to get a graduate degree but going there requires a dissertation. It is the biggest undertaking that many graduate students experience. Literature, grant applications and manuscripts are nothing as compared to the size of an average dissertation.

If you approach it correctly, writing a dissertation will not seem too intimidating. A writing plan for your own dissertation will help you. Stick to it and use this approach to make consistent progress on your dissertation. Now you can wrap up your dissertation with a solid writing plan to avoid stress.

Know the format

Before you start anything, you should know what you are expected to write in the dissertation. A lot of programs arrange seminars on writing dissertations. It is highly recommended that you attend such seminars to understand the writing formats and their requirements.

A lot of programs also post their dissertation style on the websites. Find out yours and read it to avoid future hassles.

Break the dissertation into chapters

Determine how much time you will spend on writing. Outline the major sections such as introduction, methods, material, discussion, chapters etc. so you have an exact picture of what you have to write. Spend plenty of time on writing drafts of all the major sections in the dissertation. Don’t write and edit it at the same time. You will be waste a lot of time making one part right and fall behind on your overall writing progress. Adjust with the ugly draft first and move on and leave the rest to deal with it later.

Map your work with dates

Once you have determined the content for all the major sections and chapters, set the dates for completing each section. Make a calendar and set these dates into that calendar to make your life easier. This calendar will give you concrete dates to work on. It will act as your visual outline in order to accomplish all the tasks and requirements of the dissertation.

Establish dissertation progress meetings with your instructor and submit one chapter every week. Get the instructor’s comments and reviews on each chapter and work on the previous week’s chapter and start editing.  In this way, you will be able to write new content and edit the previous work without getting stuck anywhere.

Write down the due dates of all the chapters on a piece of paper that acts as your calendar. You will be able to track your progress till the final submission. It is easier to meet small deadlines with consistent progress rather than stressing about the whole dissertation at once.

Taking some time out to plan a proper outline for the dissertation progress may sound stupid, but, it will definitely help you. This method will preserve your sanity and you will enjoy the writing process.

“To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perspective vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strengths.”

Lawrence Clark Powell

Before discussing the basics and importance of the literature review, let’s understand the meaning of a literature review?

A literature review is a discussion of a particular subject or an area. This area is not specifically described from the pages of books and novels but is also includes the description of research papers, organizational bundles, government records and  other such related things from which you can collect ample amount of data and information.

A literature review follows a fixed organizational pattern that has a hypothesis and a synthesis in its summary. The summary highlights the necessary information from the detailed panel of research and writing.

People usually consider academic writing and literature review as similar writing styles but in reality, both of these writing styles are completely different.

An academic paper is written to create a new argument in the discussion. It defines your personal opinion towards a certain subject of a specification. On the contrary, a literature review is a simple summarization and description of the information you read in the novel or any research paper.

Now let’s move on to understanding the importance of writing a literature review.

If you are working on a professional level, you are very well known about the busy criteria of people around and even yourself.

Writing a summarization of novels in a form of a literature review basically defines the plot of what are about to read or altogether describes the interest of the reader. Moreover, a literature review also describes a writer’s creditability towards his or her work. It also gives comprehensive knowledge of the subject that has been described in detail.

Who writes Literature Reviews?

Writing literature reviews is not a task for everyone. People belonging to the fields of humanities sciences, social sciences and also medical related field are subjected to write literature reviews.

For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively. Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests. Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read. For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way. (Example is taken from NCBI blog)

A literature review is a vast topic that includes plenty of insights, preliminary work, strategies for writing, organizational framework, composition, revision and consultation reviews. After leading through all these specifications, a writer can come up with a professional and worthy literature review.

We will be continuing our next blog with the insights, preliminary work and strategies of writing a literature review. Till then, stay tuned to us!

DISCLAIMER: All the above pictures have been taken from Google as references.

Sooner or later “term papers” come across to every high school student’s life. This situation is horrible because it looks like students are forced to write a high school term paper. At this time, some of them do endless research which is useless because they do not know how to write a high school term paper.