#3 Reading the Literature Review (freewrite, 10 minutes)

The literature review that I read was on the shorter side. I read a literature review on mouth guards and how they prevent concussions. This is a topic that is getting more attention from the public and researchers in the past year. There has not been a lot of research on this because concussions are hard to study. Each concussion is different in severity and in the way that it occurrs. The literature review used many sources to back up what they were writing. There has not been a lot of conclusive studies, but the writer did a good job of explaining what was good and bad from each previous study. The author took what he learned from other studies to conduct a better study. The literature clearly states that there needs to be better and more conclusive research on this topic, but there has been many attempts. This literature review was very similar to the article I used for anatomy of a scholarly journal. The literature review was organized by content. Each topic the author chose to address had its own paragraph or two. There were many sources per paragraph.

I am used to writing in this style because for my athletic training classes, we have to write case studies. These case studies need to have a mini literature review to explain and look at previous similar injuries and how they went about the rehabilitation program. I have experience in writing literature reviews, but I no that I can improve on certain aspects of them such as layout and organization of the content. These take a long time to write because you need to really examine the current research that is out there, so I also need to allow more time for myself to write and research.

This literature review is a good place for my research to start. It was clearly stated that more research and studies are needed, but there has also been enough attempts to take what worked to make a better study. I feel strongly about this topic because I have had 4 concussion while I was in high school. I had to wear mouthguards and I would like no if it helped me in any way and to possibly prevent other kids from suffering a concussion.