Author Description

***Now includes checklist for your draft reviews. See also the new video about the book on Paul Trowler's Amazon author's page ****** This short book is designed to be helpful for doctoral researchers, probably doing a PhD or an EdD, as well as those project researchers who are tasked with conducting a review of literature relevant to the project but who have limited experience of this task. Readers are invited to start at the beginning, to engage with the examples I have offered, and to continue to the end: unlike some this is a decidedly linear book.I have approached this topic in a way which is different from most texts about "writing literature reviews". It is not just a list of dos and don'ts, offering advice about process of writing a chapter. There is some of that, but the headline differences of this book to most of the others are these:* It acknowledges that pious advice of the normal sort is very difficult to follow, and explains why this is the case* It shows that switching the focus from the nature of a "literature review chapter" to you, the person doing the researching and writing, is more likely to be helpful to you* It depicts both helpful and dangerous orientations that researchers may have in approaching the literature and shows how a dynamic and protean approach in relation to 5 key helpful orientations is best* It gives examples of engagement with literature to illustrate the points being made in the book, but more importantly....* You are invited to consider some short examples and to consider the approach taken by their authors* This is designed to encourage you to surface your own perspective/s on the task of engaging with the literature * The book helps you to approach literature engagement in a more informed way, fully aware of sets of assumptions and understandings you previously held that may have been submerged* It explains why the usual term "literature review" is unhelpful. This is where I begin......The phrase "literature review" is n