Tips for writing your paper
Academic writing involves taking information (concepts, theories, and empirical results) from several sources and organizing this information in such a way that creates a new resource of information (your paper). To accomplish this goal, you’ll need to organize your paper around a coherent purpose and take large amounts of information from sources and put it into your own words so that it is highly succinct and informative.
Purpose
Consider the purpose of your paper first. The purpose will help you organize information you gather from articles. To complete your literature review, there are essentially two approaches you may take.
If your purpose is to present a specific topic with some degree of comprehensiveness, you should incorporate findings from many articles, and not necessarily dive too deeply into any one article. Use headings to outline the major issues in your topic and pull information from articles into relevant headings. There is a wide range of ways to organize a paper. Going from the general to the specific is one effective strategy, with headings giving the reader useful guide to where the paper is “going.”
On the other hand, if your topic is highly specific, and there are very few articles on the topic, you will probably go into more detail about each of these articles, examining the similarities and differences in methodology, results, and conclusions. This is an excellent approach when you find research that is contradictory of other research.
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is NOT taking a passage from your source and changing a few words and rearranging sentences. It involves reading a passage, comprehending the meaning of the passage, and conveying this meaning in your own words– generally many fewer words. When you do this, you still cite the reference, of course. Sometimes you will go into detail about highly relevant information found in an article, other times, you may cite a source or even multiple sources as references for a single statement you have made. As you read journal articles, take notice of how the authors paraphrase. Notice the absence or minimal use of direct quotes in scientific writing.
Here is a link for additional guidance, and I strongly urge you to take the time to look at all the helpful writing tips in the APA manual.
Direct Quotes
Any “word for word” passage from a source that you have in your paper is a direct quote. Direct quotes are generally avoided except in cases where paraphrasing will cause some loss in the nuance of meaning found in the original source. Basically, if the author makes a statement in such a succinct, unique way, or makes a powerful emphatic, or controversial claim, it might be useful to quote it in your paper. Otherwise, it’s best to stick to paraphrasing.
I've found that quotable passages, if there are any worthy of including in a lit review, will typically be found in the introduction or conclusion of an article you are reviewing. Quotable passages are typically not found in the methods or results sections of research papers.
