Getting A Literature Review.
It is amazing how quickly temptation will grab the souls of the desperate. I am not talking about someone starving, overcome with unrequited love, or subject to some other classical plight. I am talking about myself – a graduate student at the end of my rope, with an angry adviser breathing down my neck. My problems all started with a literature review. You see, literature reviews have never been my strong suit. I am great at coming up with new ideas, and I’m also pretty good at synthesizing ideas from a few examples of diverging viewpoints. Once I’m confronted with a large body of literature on a topic, however, I rapidly lose focus. There is no other way to explain it: I freeze.
I tried looking at examples of sample literature reviews online, but they weren’t helpful. The ones that people were showing for free were just not written at a professional level. Writing a review of literature in linguistics is uniquely challenging. From the outside, many people miss this, but the field of linguistics is an extremely divisive academic pursuit. Basically, people are either with Chomsky or against Chomsky. Everyone acts as if their opinion is the only valid one. If you are like me – someone willing to draw bits and pieces from both sides – everyone sees you as a traitor. It is almost impossible to synthesize the work of East Coast and West Coast linguists into a coherent whole. I tried and tried, but I failed. I tried, in fact, until I almost failed my class.In desperation, I went beyond looking at an online literature review. I went to a custom paper writing service. I had the money saved up for an emergency, and this was definitely an emergency! I did not have high hopes. I figured that the literature review that they gave me would be somewhat ignorant of the subject matter, and the custom thesis paper would require a great deal of revision. Nevertheless, it was my only choice. It was the 11th hour so to speak, and if I didn’t have the background for my thesis ready soon, all would be lost.
I was actually surprised by the quality of the paper they gave me. The APA style literature review summarized succinctly – albeit loosely – the major finding of linguistics in the last several decades. The paper was not professional, But it was written as if a solid and interested amateur had spent some time researching the subject matter. In the end, I was able to revise it into something more high-level and professional.