International student: Chapter 2 rewritten from summary to synthesis
Wei, 29 | PhD in Information Systems | Public R1, West Coast
The challenge
My chair said my literature review was a list. My English was not the problem; the structure was. Every paragraph started with an author name and summarized one paper.
What we changed
- We rewrote topic sentences first, so every paragraph opened with a claim about the literature instead of an author.
- Sources were regrouped into three themes, and each theme closed with the methodological limitation it shared.
- An editor did a separate language pass afterwards, so structure and language were never being fixed in the same round.
The outcome
Chapter 2 went from 9,400 words of summary to 11,200 words of synthesis and was approved with one comment.
Once I understood that no paragraph could be about one paper, the chapter almost rewrote itself.