When you are looking at the different stages of writing your dissertation, you will see that a number of guides look at the different stages of your literature search and review. This will be the point that you might actually get confused, as you will be looking at the information you are reading and never thought it could be as difficult as it seems.

Many students (and me included) look at the literature as a discussion of what is happening in the field of study at the present time and review the actual literature and say what points are important. The key thing that I and so many others miss out is the point to include arguments and meaning in this section of your dissertation paper.

You need to determine what it is that has been done before and why the different researches have used certain practices and methods and why they reached the different places that they have. You will also need to understand the different parts of why they have reached their analysis and why other researches have reached theirs.

You should also understand the historical differences that have emerged and how these have affected other studies, as they will porbably have been these. You will not want to supply the reader with a running commentary though, as this will significantly affect the readers understating of whether you have questioned so what?

Using the example of ’so what?’, one lecturer on my undergrad degree course caught my attention and thus mean that I started to question why researches were coming out with different explanations and also to question the methods that they were using were correct and should have been used in the situation. You should also be looking at these different arguments and recognizing whether any are flawed and establishing this here.

Many students will provide a commerntary on the letrature available on the topic, yet as well as this, you should also focus on why the authors have reached a certain point and why they have used specific methods and reasoning to get there. I did make this mistake in my undergraduate degree disssertation, yet I did receive a good standard as I put a lot of effort into the literature; thus you will need to recognize how important this part of the dissertation paper will be to the rest of your project.

Other Tips:

1. Step 1 – Planning Your Dissertation When you are looking at your dissertation research project, whether this is for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree, you will need to understand that a dissertation is a rather lengthy process that requires you to put some planning into it. You will need to establish what you want to get out from the whole [...]...
2. Step 9 – Dissertations Conclusions and Recommendations The final stage and chapter in your dissertation research paper will be the concluding chapter that will include recommendations. These recommendation may or may not form an additional chapter to this should you be completing the dissertation and degree whilst still with your employer, as they will want to know that you have some [...]...
3. Step 7 – Dissertation Primary Research At this stage, the primary research phase, you will have most porbably written up the literature review of your dissertation, methodology, a draft introduction and also recognized that you are ready to complete the different parts of the primary data collection stage. You will want to understand that there are many different processes in [...]...
4. Step 8 – Presenting Dissertation Results & Discussion When it comes to the point of presenting your dissertation results and discussing them you may be a little confused how to do this and so many of us are when we first do it. You should prepare what you want to look over in this chapter and more significantly, what you want to [...]...
5. Step 4 – Scheduling Your Dissertation Work You will need to be clear about your dissertation and how you will go about the different parts. You want to be clear that you will complete all of the necessary and different tasks that you have, but you really don’t want to be confused about what you need to do and when as [...]...