Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review is concerned with the writing of a literature review and is not designed to address any of the preliminary processes leading up to the actual writing of the literature review. This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on writing literature reviews that appeared in English in Today's Research World. This volume progresses from general to specific issues in the writing of literature reviews. It opens with some orientations that raise awareness of the issues that surround the telling of a research story. Issues of structure and matters of language, style, and rhetoric are then discussed. Sections on metadiscourse, citation, and paraphrasing and summarizing are included.

Learning to tell a compelling research story can have a significant impact on your career. It can make you stand out at professional conferences, on the job market, or during an ideal networking opportunity. It is easy to tell a research story badly. It takes time and effort to learn to tell a research story well. This compact and engaging volume presents a series of techniques followed by theatre-inspired, field tested exercises that will help you improve your research presentations. Once you’ve learned how to create a dynamic live performance of your research story, you may find that this professional obligation is no longer something to dread, and may even become a highlight of your research experience.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

The compelling, groundbreaking guide to creative writing that reveals how the brain responds to storytelling Stories shape who we are. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions and mold our beliefs. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human. So, how do master storytellers compel us? In The Science of Storytelling, award-winning writer and acclaimed teacher of creative writing Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can write better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers—and also our brains—create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change. Will Storr’s superbly chosen examples range from Harry Potter to Jane Austen to Alice Walker, Greek drama to Russian novels to Native American folk tales, King Lear to Breaking Bad to children’s stories. With sections such as “The Dramatic Question,” “Creating a World,” and “Plot, Endings, and Meaning,” as well as a practical, step-by-step appendix dedicated to “The Sacred Flaw Approach,” The Science of Storytelling reveals just what makes stories work, placing it alongside such creative writing classics as John Yorke’s Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story and Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. Enlightening and empowering, The Science of Storytelling is destined to become an invaluable resource for writers of all stripes, whether novelist, screenwriter, playwright, or writer of creative or traditional nonfiction.

Good writing skills and habits are critical for scholarly success. Every article is a story, and employing the techniques of effective storytelling enhances scholars’ abilities to share their insights and ideas, increasing the impact of their research. This book draws on the tools and techniques of storytelling employed in fiction and non-fiction writing to help academic writers enhance the clarity, presentation, and flow of their scholarly work, and provides insights on navigating the writing, reviewing, and coauthoring processes.

This research-based book foregrounds Black narrative traditions and honors alternative methods of data collection, analysis, and representation. Toliver presents a semi-fictionalized narrative in an alternative science fiction setting, refusing white-centric qualitative methods and honoring the ways of the griots who were the scholars of their African nations. By utilizing Black storytelling, Afrofuturism, and womanism as an onto-epistemological tool, this book asks readers to elevate Black imaginations, uplift Black dreams, and consider how Afrofuturity is qualitative futurity. By centering Black girls, the book considers the ethical responsibility of researchers to focus upon the words of our participants, not only as a means to better understand our historic and current world, but to better situate inquiry for what the future world and future research could look like. Ultimately, this book decenters traditional, white-centered qualitative methods and utilizes Afrofuturism as an onto-epistemological tool and ethical premise. It asks researchers to consider how we move forward in data collection, data analysis, and data representation by centering how Black girls reclaim and recover the past, counter negative and elevate positive realities that exist in the present, and create new possibilities for the future. The semi-fictionalized narrative of the book highlights the intricate methodological and theoretical work that undergirds the story. It will be an important text for both new and seasoned researchers interested in social justice. Informed and anti-racist researchers will find Endarkened storywork a useful tool for educational, cultural, and social critiques now and in the future.