WRTG 391

WRTG 391

Assignment #3: Literature Review

Writing Assignment #3 will be a literature review. Writer’s Help defines a literature review as “an academic genre in which the writer reports on and evaluates research that has been published in a particular field about a particular topic. (Literature refers to published writing, not to literary texts.)”

Courses that fulfill the General Education Requirements (GERs) at UMUC all have a common theme—technological transformations. In following this theme this semester in WRTG391, we have read the analysis of one author, Neil Postman, on the impact of technology on society. In this literature review, you will continue this theme.

You have five choices for your essay topic. Please choose one.

1. Review the literature on the impact of the Internet on information literacy and library skills. In reviewing the literature on this topic, you may want to draw upon what Neil Postman says about technology and information in Technopoly, especially in chapters 4 and 5.

For example, you might review the literature on one or more of the following. These are just examples. Many approaches are possible for this topic.

a. The impact of the Internet on plagiarism in student papers.

b. The impact of the Internet on research methods among students.

c. The impact of Wikipedia and other web 2.0 applications on the use of information.

Approach and Requirements

You have written an annotated bibliography of 12 sources on a topic. Now, in writing a literature review, you will be asked to synthesize and summarize at least 10 scholarly articles on the topic. You may have more than 10 scholarly articles if you would like to, but the minimum number is 10.

Your literature review should be 2000-2500 words, not including your “references” pages at the end of the review. In other words, the text of the paper should be 2000-2500 words.

In addition, as stated above, your literature review should include at least 10 sources in the “references” section. This means that you may decide not to use all 12 sources that you summarized in your annotated bibliography. You are free to use all 12 of them. However, it is possible that your experience in writing summaries of the 12 sources led you to conclude that a few of them will not be as helpful to your topic as you had originally thought. You may decide not to include such sources in the literature review. This is totally up to you. Moreover, you might find other sources that you would like to include in your literature review that were not included in your annotated bibliography. You may use such sources in your literature review as well.

Please keep in mind that it is possible that, in writing your annotated bibliography, you wrote on a fairly broad topic. You may have written annotations of texts that covered a wide spectrum of issues in, for example, the impact of the Internet on education. However, you may have noticed that your best articles are on a particular issue on this topic—the use of multimedia in online classes, the workload of the instructor in online classes, or something of this nature. If this is the case, you might find additional articles on that one particular issue and write your literature review on that issue.

In other words, this process is a recursive one. You might find reasons to hone in on and narrow your topic even further after you have written the annotated bibliography.

Organization

Your literature review should be organized in the following manner:

Introduction: Write one or two paragraphs in which you introduce the reader to your topic.

Categories: Divide your sources into a few categories. A suggestion is that you divide them into three to five categories. Writer’s Help has some sample literature review papers. You might find these samples helpful in seeing how writers organize the literature on a topic into categories.

Conclusion: Summarize what the literature says on your topic.

Rubric for Literature Review

Introduces the literature review by identifying the topic in a clear and specific manner.	10
Divides the research into categories	10
Discusses the research in each category with adequate support from the sources, integrating the sources skillfully throughout the paragraphs.	20
Maintains unity among the paragraphs and themes.	10
Maintains coherence among the paragraphs and themes.	10
Employs a fluid writing style and an appropriate vocabulary	10
Follows APA format in both the citations and in the reference list	15
Maintains accurate grammar and punctuation.	15
Total:	100