I found Baumeister and Leary's "Writing Narrative Literature Reviews" one of the most informative and practical articles I've ever read. It pointed out so many amateurish pitfalls that inexperienced reviewers fall into, myself included. I even caught mistakes that I was beginning to make for the final project in this class: the fact that literature reviews must consider "methodological diversity" points me toward a mistake I was starting to make in my final manuscript; I was using studies that were too similar to prove my point, rather than finding a greater variety of different methodologies. As Baumeister and Leary write "a hypothesis supported by 50 studies may in fact be shakier, more dubious, and simply more wrong than a hypothesis supported by 5 studies, if the 50 used the same method whereas the 5 used all different ones" (316). My previous, heavily flawed technique was to only use literature that supported (or supported through my criticism) my hypotheses, which Baumeister and Leary refer to as being an "intuitive lawyer" (319). I will balance out my future research for this assignment and incorporate a greater scope of material. Second, I always used my introductions for "dramatic effect," never wanting to state explicitly what the paper was about until the final analysis or until the "discussion" portion (316). I was always worried that explicitly stating everything, even in general terms, in an introduction would make the paper repetitive when I expanded on each topic later on.

I especially enjoyed the distinctions Baumeister and Leary drew between empirical and literary reviews. The flexibility of the literary review, the ability to move beyond just empirical data, and to raise questions that cannot be answered, provides the literary reviewer with the power to guide empiricists toward new arenas of study; by raising questions or pointing out flawed studies, new studies can be made to answer these concerns.