Introduction:
a. You have a draft of this written already in your first assignment, where you laid out the topic you would research.
b. This is an overview of your topic
i. What your interest in the topic is (could be in first person but doesn’t have to be)
ii. An overview of what the literature reviewed shows (your thesis, or the basic story you are telling, if you like to think of it as a story)
II. Your method of doing the literature review:
a. Tell how you did the search, and how you decided what to include and what to exclude.
i. This should include how you located the articles and books to review
1. Using library search resources—e.g.,
a. what research databased you used
b. your search string for those data bases
2. Using works cited from sources you found relevant
ii. This might include the range of years you reviewed, languages. You can talk about this in terms of delimitations of the research

b.“Delimitations” are the boundaries you have set for the study, or what you decided to include and what you decided to exclude. It is useful to YOU to state this, so when you come back to the review, you know what you did; it is also useful to the READER to know what is included and what is not, and keeps the reader from criticizing you for leaving out things that you had good reason to leave out.
c. In our readings, see Bottiani et al. (2017) example of how to describe how you did your literature search, you method (p. 371).
III. The body of the paper:
a. Start by telling how the body is organized—an intro to this section.
b. This should be organized by themes or concepts or uses of the literature—see diagram from overview assignment repeated here and/or discussion in the NCSU overview suggested above for ideas, but you create organization that makes sense to you, for your topic and purpose
c. Remember, throughout the body, that since a lit review is your own understanding and organization of the literature, you need to tell us what that is—have a conversation with us about what you’re talking about next and why
d. In general, this should communicate the relationships between the sources—the relationships you are recognizing and explaining, in terms of how they relate to each other and how they relate to your interests in the topic
e. Discussion should include summary and quotations from the articles and books reviewed, and these should have correct in-text citations using APA or Chicago
f. See Granello (2001) for discussion of how to move from summarizing to evaluating. IV. IV. Conclusion:
a. Summary of what you have shown that the literature shows—the conclusion to your story
b. Suggestions for what research this would lead you to do
c. Suggestions for further literature review work you see the need to do