So, You Have to Write a Literature Review - (IEEE PCs Professional Engineering Communication) Annotated by Catherine Berdanier & Joshua Lenart

About the Book

"This book is focused on the writing of literature reviews, a difficult genre to master and one that is typically not addressed at the undergraduate or graduate levels. The content for the book is driven through exercises and activities that facilitate the writing progress. Grounded in English (composition, rhetoric, and writing studies), engineering education, and technical communication research, this book teaches writing from a genre theory lens. This lens allows writers to focus on how the purpose of sentences or paragraphs interacts with the other content and with the disciplinary expectations for writing for specific audiences. The text is organized so that readers can customize their learning pace. The authors outline how readers can write an effective LR as part of a 2-day workshop or within a 2-, 8-, or 16-week period. This scalable model makes the text ideal for independent learning or as part of a graduate writing workshop"--

Book Synopsis

Is a literature review looming in your future? Are you procrastinating on writing a literature review at this very moment? If so, this is the book for you. Writing often causes trepidation and procrastination for engineering students--issues that compound while writing a literature review, a type of academic writing most engineers are never formally taught. Consider this workbook as a "couch-to-5k" program for engineering writers rather than runners: if you complete the activities in this book from beginning to end, you will have a literature review draft ready for revision and content editing by your research advisor.

So, You Have to Write a Literature Review presents a dynamic and practical method in which engineering students--typically late-career undergraduates or graduate students--can learn to write literature reviews, and translate genre-based writing instruction into easy-to-follow, bite-sized activities and content. Written in a refreshingly conversational style while acknowledging that writing is quite difficult, Catherine Berdanier and Joshua Lenart leverage their unique disciplinary backgrounds with decades of experience teaching academic engineering writing in this user-friendly workbook.

From the Back Cover

SO, YOU HAVE TO WRITE A LITERATURE REVIEW: A GUIDED WORKBOOK FOR ENGINEERS

Is a literature review looming in your future? Are you procrastinating on writing a literature review at this very moment? If so, this is the book for you. Writing often causes trepidation and procrastination for engineering students--issues that compound while writing a literature review, a type of academic writing most engineers are never formally taught. Consider this workbook as a "couch-to-5k" program for engineering writers rather than runners: if you complete the activities in this book from beginning to end, you will have a literature review draft ready for revision and content editing by your research advisor.

So, You Have to Write a Literature Review presents a dynamic and practical method in which engineering students--typically late-career undergraduates or graduate students--can learn to write literature reviews, and translate genre-based writing instruction into easy-to-follow, bite-sized activities and content. Written in a refreshingly conversational style while acknowledging that writing is quite difficult, Catherine Berdanier and Joshua Lenart leverage their unique disciplinary backgrounds with decades of experience teaching academic engineering writing in this user-friendly workbook.

About the Author

DR. CATHERINE BERDANIER is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. She holds an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. Her research focuses mainly on graduate-level engineering education with emphasis on engineering writing and communication, attrition, and persistence. Her research has been funded through multiple NSF awards. She is the Director of the Engineering Cognitive Research Laboratory (E-CRL), where she and her graduate students investigate questions concerning the human side of engineering through a variety of quantitative, qualitative, experimental, and analytical methods.

DR. JOSHUA LENART is an Associate Instructor with the Communication, Leadership, Ethics, and Research (CLEAR) Program at the University of Utah where he also received his Ph.D. in Writing and Rhetoric Studies and now teaches technical communication for the College of Engineering. His teaching expertise includes administrative and organizational writing, grant writing, teambuilding, and strategic communications. His research expertise focuses on natural resource management policy as it relates to landscape-scale impacts on wildlife habitat, hydrologic systems, community resilience, adaptation planning, and long-term land use conservation. For the past five years, he has led various transdisciplinary research projects examining land, water, and wildlife resource management conflicts vis-à-vis policy, stakeholder input, feasibility and environmental impact assessment, and collective impact engagement.