Review of the Literature

The purpose of the Review of the Literature is to show your reader that you have `done your homework' and that your work is credible. That is, you want to convince the reader that you know what you are talking about, and have not made things up out of whole cloth. You need to convince the thoughtful reader, especially one with some background of his/her own on the subject, that you have read what others have said about the topic--the so-called `standard literature' on the subject. You don't have to agree with it, but you have to know it and show that you have taken what others said seriously. If you are going to disagree with what others wrote, you have to do it convincingly, showing exactly how they are `wrong' and why your approach is better. Otherwise people may simply ignore your writing, dismissing it as `out in left field' or 'anecdotal' or just simply whacky.

This can take various forms; below is an example of a very minimal review of the literature I wrote for a chapter in a longer book. Your review of the literature for your paper should be at least this long and comprehensive.

The best source of the linguistic history of Alsace, together with clear statements about the actual distribution of dialect forms, isoglosses (subdialectal boundaries) and other interesting facts of linguistic practice in Alsace is to be found in the two-volume work of Lévy (1929). A more succinct version of the linguistic history of the area can be found in Philipps (1975); Hartweg in a number of articles (1981, 1983, 1986) summarizes both the linguistic and the sociolinguistic situation admirably. Gardner-Chloros (1995, 1991) describes the interesting kinds of code-switching and other multilingualism that still occurs in Strasbourg, even in fancy shops and banks, not just by uneducated or rural people. Denis and Veltman (1989) gives a pessimistic view of the future of Alsatian dialect, while Vassberg (1993) presents an eclectic overview of the history, attitudes, policies, conversational and code-switching behavior, and results of a questionnaire-survey in upper Alsace (Haut-Rhin, centered around Mulhouse) and lower Alsace (Bas-Rhin, centered around Strasbourg). (Schiffman 1996:145)