essay on the study of literature

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

An Essay on the Study of Literature

Learn about this topic in these articles:, discussed in biography.

…l’étude de la littérature (1761; An Essay on the Study of Literature , 1764). Meanwhile, the main purpose of his exile had not been neglected. Not without weighty thought, Gibbon at last abjured his new faith and was publicly readmitted to the Protestant communion at Christmas 1754. “It was here,” Gibbon…

If you could change one thing about college, what would it be?

Graduate faster

Better quality online classes

Flexible schedule

Access to top-rated instructors

College Success

Why Study Literature?

05.15.2023 • 5 min read

Learn about the value and benefits of studying literature: how it develops our skills as well as shapes our understanding of the society we live in.

What Is Literature?

The benefits of studying literature.

Literature & Outlier.org

Many libraries in the U.S. are under attack.

From small towns to big cities, it’s more common to see protests outside of libraries. Libraries are under the microscope and being scrutinized for what content they have on their shelves.

Some people see certain books as a threat to society. While others believe everyone has a right to access any information they wish. The fact is literature is so powerful some people see it as dangerous and want to choose what the public has a right to read.

This is not the first time in history that people have tried to censor literature for what it says. So what really is literature and why is it so powerful?

In this article, we’ll define literature, talk about the history of literature, and the benefits of studying literature in college.

Literature is an art form that uses language to create imaginative experiences. It includes poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction.

Literature communicates ideas and emotions.It entertains, educates, and inspires readers. Literature explores complex themes and is an important part of human culture.

From its original Latin derivative, "writing formed with letters," to its current definition, a "body of written works," our understanding of literature has evolved.

Literature explains society and culture. It both criticizes and affirms cultural values based on the writer’s perceptions. It expresses and explores the human condition. It looks back to the past and onward toward the future.

As literature represents the culture and history of a language or people, the study of literature has great value. To study literature means looking deeply into a large body of written work and examining it as an art form.

Of course, there are many different literary genres, or types of literature. At a liberal arts school , a literature program, a student would study these genres extensively and understand the historical and cultural context they represent.

Literary Fiction vs. Genre Fiction

Students in a college literature program examine many forms of literature, including:

Some definitions of literature separate fiction into 2 categories: literary fiction and genre fiction. Genre fiction consists of more popular literature read for entertainment. Some examples of genre fiction include crime, fantasy, and science fiction stories.

Literary fiction explores themes of the human condition. These stories cannot be further categorized and are read primarily for a philosophical search for the meaning of life. Examples of literary fiction include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

You can discover more distinctions by studying literature in depth.

1. Literature Develops Communication Skills

The foundation of literature is the English Language. By reading literature, you can improve your knowledge of language: vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, content creation, and more. When you immerse yourself in William Shakespeare, Celeste Ng, or Chinua Achebe, you're absorbing new words, expressions, and ideas—without even realizing it.

You can use everything you learn to improve your own writing and communication skills . You will use these skills beyond high school and college. In our everyday lives, we navigate personal relationships, craft emails, present projects, collaborate with teammates, analyze data, and more.

Yuval Noah Harari has written much of his own literature on the history and success of the human race. In his book Sapiens, he emphasizes our ability to craft stories as one of our most valuable skills: " Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.” Through these collective stories, we learn about the human experience, both in smaller interpersonal ways and on a larger, more global scale.

2. Literature Teaches Us About the Human Condition

Literature helps us reflect on the human experience, teaching us about who we are and the world we live in. It presents a range of emotions, from love to anger to grief to happiness. It gives us insight and context about societal norms and cultural traditions.

It explores our history and our present; it imagines our futures. It introduces us to new ways of thinking and living, compelling us to think critically and creatively about our own experiences.

Through literature, we see we're not alone in our thoughts and feelings. The characters we read about have already experienced similar difficulties and worked to solve or change them, giving us the blueprint to do the same.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice goes beyond social commentary to explore the complexities of familial relationships, romantic relationships, and friendships. Mr. Darcy insults Elizabeth Bennet without meaning to, Elizabeth Bennet makes harsh judgments without knowing all the facts, and Mrs. Bennet worries about her daughter's future constantly. We can see ourselves in them.

3. Literature Teaches Us About Empathy

When we connect with literature's characters and narratives, we learn how to empathize with others. While we’re not physically experiencing the raging seas in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse or the loss of a loved one in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, we are swept up in the story and the emotion. This helps us develop empathy and emotional intelligence.

In a 2006 study , professors at the University of Toronto concluded a lifetime exposure to literary fiction positively correlated with advanced social ability. In 2020, the Harvard Business Review encouraged business students to read literary works to enhance their abilities to keep an open mind, process information, and make effective decisions.

4. Literature Helps Us Explore New Ideas

With words, and not actions, authors create spaces where we can explore new ideas, new structures, new concepts, and new products. When the only limit is your imagination, anything is possible in creative writing.

We can dive into the past to understand British society at the turn of the 19th century in Austen's Pride and Prejudice or jump into potential futures through Harari's Homo Deus. We can consider alternative futures like that in George Orwell's 1984 or conduct experiments in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

We don't encounter monsters or humanoid robots in our everyday lives (at least we hope not!). But when we explore them through literature, we’re equipped to consider, challenge, and analyze concepts we don't yet know or understand. This practice opens our minds and allows us to be more flexible when we face the new and unknown. These critical thinking skills enable us to process information easier.

5. Literature Changes the Way We Think

With everything we learn from literature and the skills it helps us develop, literature changes the way we think, work, and act.

When we can think more critically, we arrive at different conclusions. When we open our minds and empathize with others, we better accept and tolerate differences. When we can articulate and communicate effectively, we work better together to achieve and succeed.

Whether English literature or Russian literature or French literature, literature is the key to understanding ourselves and society.

Literature and Outlier.org

Looking to study literature and develop your own writing skills? Outlier.org’s cutting-edge College Writing course is a great place to start. Through interviews with celebrated writers and writing secrets from instructor John Kaag, you'll learn how to use words to express yourself and communicate more effectively.

The course explores:

How to level up your love letters

What writing and magic have in common

How to write better professional emails using The Princess Bride

How to get your writing published

How to create the perfect short sentence

Outlier courses are 100% online, so you can learn at your own pace from the comfort of your own home. At $149 per credit, you’ll save 50% compared to other college courses, all while earning transferable credits from the top-ranked University of Pittsburgh. If you decide to continue your education in literature, you can take the credit with you to the degree program of your choice.

It’s no doubt studying literature will give you a well-rounded education. It is through literature that societies have grown and developed—inspiring change throughout the world. Choosing to study literature will not only give you a glimpse into the past but help you articulate the present and inspire change in the future. By studying literature you will have the power to connect with others and truly touch their hearts and minds.

About the Author

Bob Patterson is a former Director of Admissions at Stanford University, UNC Chapel Hill, and UC Berkeley; Daisy Hill is the co-author of Uni in the USA…and beyond published by the Good Schools Guide 2019. Together, they have established MyGuidED, a new educational tool for students looking to apply to university (launching 2023).

Degrees+: Discover Online College Unlike Anything You’ve Experienced

Outlier (winner of TIME Best Inventions 2020) and Golden Gate University (#1 school for working professionals) have redesigned the experience of earning a college degree to minimize cost and maximize outcomes. Explore a revolutionary way to earn your college degree:

Related Articles

What Are the Liberal Arts in Education?

The article defines what liberal arts education is, explains the different degree fields, and lists possible professions you can do with the degree.

Jennifer Rivera

Subject Matter Expert

10 Amazing Jobs for Communication Majors [2023]

This article explains what a communications degree is and the benefits of studying it. It lists the skills a communication major has and the best-paid jobs, including the entry-level and average salaries.

Mia Frothingham

8 Reasons Why Having a College Degree Is Important

Learn more about why a college degree is important by understanding the benefits and value of having one.

Bob Patterson

Former Stanford Director of Admissions

Further Reading

Best 15 tips to make the most of college [2023], what are soft skills in college, thinking about going back to college in your 30s here’s everything you need to know, a complete guide on how to write a winning scholarship essay, 7 best self-paced online college programs [2023], what is community college.

You are here

An essay on the study of literature: written originally in french, by edward gibbon, jun. esq; now first translated into english.essai sur l'étude de la littérature. english.

ebook version of An essay on the study of literature: Written originally in French, by Edward Gibbon, Jun. Esq; Now first translated into English.Essai sur l'étude de la littérature. English

An essay on the study of literature: Written originally in French, by Edward Gibbon, Jun. Esq; Now first translated into English. Essai sur l'étude de la littérature. English (Gibbon, Edward, 1737-1794.) [8],168p. ; 8⁰. (London :) printed for T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt,1764. Horizontal chain lines. Pages [165]-168 contain advertisements Reproduction of original from the British Library. Norton, 6 English Short Title Catalog, ESTCT79690. Electronic data. Farmington Hills, Mich. : Thomson Gale, 2003. Page image (PNG). Digitized image of the microfilm version produced in Woodbridge, CT by Research Publications, 1982-2002 (later known as Primary Source Microfilm, an imprint of the Gale Group).

• Download:   4651.epub Document (134.8 KB)

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: An essay on the study of literature: Written originally in French, by Edward Gibbon, Jun. Esq; Now first translated into English.Essai sur l'étude de la littérature. English (http://ota.ox.ac.uk/id/4651) by Gibbon, Edward, 1737-1794., licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

1 What Is Literature and Why Do We Study It?

In this book created for my English 211 Literary Analysis introductory course for English literature and creative writing majors at the College of Western Idaho, I’ll introduce several different critical approaches that literary scholars may use to answer these questions.  The critical method we apply to a text can provide us with different perspectives as we learn to interpret a text and appreciate its meaning and beauty.

The existence of literature, however we define it, implies that we study literature. While people have been “studying” literature as long as literature has existed, the formal study of literature as we know it in college English literature courses began in the 1940s with the advent of New Criticism. The New Critics were formalists with a vested interest in defining literature–they were, after all, both creating and teaching about literary works. For them, literary criticism was, in fact, as John Crowe Ransom wrote in his 1942 essay “ Criticism, Inc., ” nothing less than “the business of literature.”

Responding to the concern that the study of literature at the university level was often more concerned with the history and life of the author than with the text itself, Ransom responded, “the students of the future must be permitted to study literature, and not merely about literature. But I think this is what the good students have always wanted to do. The wonder is that they have allowed themselves so long to be denied.”

We’ll learn more about New Criticism in Section Two. For now, let’s return to the two questions I posed earlier.

What is literature?

First, what is literature ? I know your high school teacher told you never to look up things on Wikipedia, but for the purposes of literary studies, Wikipedia can actually be an effective resource. You’ll notice that I link to Wikipedia articles occasionally in this book. Here’s how Wikipedia defines literature :

“ Literature  is any collection of  written  work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an  art  form, especially  prose   fiction ,  drama , and  poetry . [1]  In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include  oral literature , much of which has been transcribed. [2] Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.”

This definition is well-suited for our purposes here because throughout this course, we will be considering several types of literary texts in a variety of contexts.

I’m a Classicist—a student of Greece and Rome and everything they touched—so I am always interested in words with Latin roots. The Latin root of our modern word literature  is  litera , or “letter.” Literature, then, is inextricably intertwined with the act of writing. But what kind of writing?

Who decides which texts are “literature”?

The second question is at least as important as the first one. If we agree that literature is somehow special and different from ordinary writing, then who decides which writings count as literature? Are English professors the only people who get to decide? What qualifications and training does someone need to determine whether or not a text is literature? What role do you as the reader play in this decision about a text?

Let’s consider a few examples of things that we would all probably classify as literature. I think we can all (probably) agree that the works of William Shakespeare are literature. We can look at Toni Morrison’s outstanding ouvre of work and conclude, along with the Nobel Prize Committee, that books such as Beloved   and  Song of Solomon   are literature. And if you’re taking a creative writing course and have been assigned the short stories of Raymond Carver or the poems of Joy Harjo , you’re probably convinced that these texts are literature too.

In each of these three cases, a different “deciding” mechanism is at play. First, with Shakespeare, there’s history and tradition. These plays that were written 500 years ago are still performed around the world and taught in high school and college English classes today. It seems we have consensus about the tragedies, histories, comedies, and sonnets of the Bard of Avon (or whoever wrote the plays).

In the second case, if you haven’t heard of Toni Morrison (and I am very sorry if you haven’t), you probably have heard of the Nobel Prize. This is one of the most prestigious awards given in literature, and since she’s a winner, we can safely assume that Toni Morrison’s works are literature.

Finally, your creative writing professor is an expert in their field. You know they have an MFA (and worked hard for it), so when they share their favorite short stories or poems with you, you trust that they are sharing works considered to be literature, even if you haven’t heard of Raymond Carver or Joy Harjo before taking their class.

(Aside: What about fanfiction? Is fanfiction literature?)

We may have to save the debate about fan fiction for another day, though I introduced it because there’s some fascinating and even literary award-winning fan fiction out there.

Returning to our question, what role do we as readers play in deciding whether something is literature? Like John Crowe Ransom quoted above, I think that the definition of literature should depend on more than the opinions of literary critics and literature professors.

I also want to note that contrary to some opinions, plenty of so-called genre fiction can also be classified as literature. The Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has written both science fiction and historical fiction. Iain Banks , the British author of the critically acclaimed novel The Wasp Factory , published popular science fiction novels under the name Iain M. Banks. In other words, genre alone can’t tell us whether something is literature or not.

In this book, I want to give you the tools to decide for yourself. We’ll do this by exploring several different critical approaches that we can take to determine how a text functions and whether it is literature. These lenses can reveal different truths about the text, about our culture, and about ourselves as readers and scholars.

“Turf Wars”: Literary criticism vs. authors

It’s important to keep in mind that literature and literary theory have existed in conversation with each other since Aristotle used Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex to define tragedy. We’ll look at how critical theory and literature complement and disagree with each other throughout this book. For most of literary history, the conversation was largely a friendly one.

But in the twenty-first century, there’s a rising tension between literature and criticism. In his 2016 book Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict, literary scholar Martin Paul Eve argues that twenty-first century authors have developed

a series of novelistic techniques that, whether deliberate or not on the part of the author, function to outmanoeuvre, contain, and determine academic reading practices. This desire to discipline university English through the manipulation and restriction of possible hermeneutic paths is, I contend, a result firstly of the fact that the metafictional paradigm of the high-postmodern era has pitched critical and creative discourses into a type of productive competition with one another. Such tensions and overlaps (or ‘turf wars’) have only increased in light of the ongoing breakdown of coherent theoretical definitions of ‘literature’ as distinct from ‘criticism’ (15).

One of Eve’s points is that by narrowly and rigidly defining the boundaries of literature, university English professors have inadvertently created a situation where the market increasingly defines what “literature” is, despite the protestations of the academy. In other words, the gatekeeper role that literary criticism once played is no longer as important to authors. For example, (almost) no one would call 50 Shades of Grey literature—but the salacious E.L James novel was the bestselling book of the decade from 2010-2019, with more than 35 million copies sold worldwide.

If anyone with a blog can get a six-figure publishing deal , does it still matter that students know how to recognize and analyze literature? I think so, for a few reasons.

• First, the practice of reading critically helps you to become a better reader and writer, which will help you to succeed not only in college English courses but throughout your academic and professional career.
• Second, analysis is a highly sought after and transferable skill. By learning to analyze literature, you’ll practice the same skills you would use to analyze anything important. “Data analyst” is one of the most sought after job positions in the New Economy—and if you can analyze Shakespeare, you can analyze data. Indeed.com’s list of top 10 transferable skills includes analytical skills , which they define as “the traits and abilities that allow you to observe, research and interpret a subject in order to develop complex ideas and solutions.”
• Finally, and for me personally, most importantly, reading and understanding literature makes life make sense. As we read literature, we expand our sense of what is possible for ourselves and for humanity. In the challenges we collectively face today, understanding the world and our place in it will be important for imagining new futures.

Critical theories: A targeted approach to writing about literature

Ultimately, there’s not one “right” way to read a text. In this book. we will explore a variety of critical theories that scholars use to analyze literature. The book is organized around different targets that are associated with the approach introduced in each chapter. In the introduction, for example, our target is literature. In future chapters you’ll explore these targeted analysis techniques:

• Author: Biographical Criticism
• Text: New Criticism
• Reader: Reader Response Criticism
• Gap: Deconstruction (Post-Structuralism)
• Context: New Historicism and Cultural Studies
• Power: Marxist and Postcolonial Criticism
• Mind: Psychological Criticism
• Gender: Feminist, Post Feminist, and Queer Theory
• Nature: Ecocriticism

Each chapter will feature the target image with the central approach in the center. You’ll read a brief introduction about the theory, explore some primary texts (both critical and literary), watch a video, and apply the theory to a primary text. Each one of these theories could be the subject of its own entire course, so keep in mind that our goal in this book is to introduce these theories and give you a basic familiarity with these tools for literary analysis. For more information and practice, I recommend Steven Lynn’s excellent Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory , which provides a similar introductory framework.

I am so excited to share these tools with you and see you grow as a literary scholar. As we explore each of these critical worlds, you’ll likely find that some critical theories feel more natural or logical to you than others. I find myself much more comfortable with deconstruction than with psychological criticism, for example. Pay attention to how these theories work for you because this will help you to expand your approaches to texts and prepare you for more advanced courses in literature.

P.S. If you want to know what my favorite book is, I usually tell people it’s Herman Melville’s Moby Dick . And I do love that book! But I really have no idea what my “favorite” book of all time is, let alone what my favorite book was last year. Every new book that I read is a window into another world and a template for me to make sense out of my own experience and better empathize with others. That’s why I love literature. I hope you’ll love this experience too.

writings in prose or verse, especially :  writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest (Merriam Webster)

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Introduction to Literature: What? Why? How?

When is the last time you read a book or a story simply because it interested you? If you were to classify that book, would you call it fiction or literature? This is an interesting separation, with many possible reasons for it. One is that “fiction” and “literature” are regarded as quite different things. “Fiction,” for example, is what people read for enjoyment. “Literature” is what they read for school. Or “fiction” is what living people write and is about the present. “Literature” was written by people (often white males) who have since died and is about times and places that have nothing to do with us. Or “fiction” offers everyday pleasures, but “literature” is to be honored and respected, even though it is boring. Of course, when we put anything on a pedestal, we remove it from everyday life, so the corollary is that literature is to be honored and respected, but it is not to be read, certainly not by any normal person with normal interests.

Sadly, it is the guardians of literature, that is, of the classics, who have done so much to take the life out of literature, to put it on a pedestal and thereby to make it an irrelevant aspect of American life. People study literature because they love literature. They certainly don’t do it for the money. But what happens too often, especially in colleges, is that teachers forget what it was that first interested them in the study of literature. They forget the joy that they first felt (and perhaps still feel) as they read a new novel or a poem or as they reread a work and saw something new in it. Instead, they erect formidable walls around these literary works, giving the impression that the only access to a work is through deep learning and years of study. Such study is clearly important for scholars, but this kind of scholarship is not the only way, or even necessarily the best way, for most people to approach literature. Instead it makes the literature seem inaccessible. It makes the literature seem like the province of scholars. “Oh, you have to be smart to read that,” as though Shakespeare or Dickens or Woolf wrote only for English teachers, not for general readers.

What is Literature?

In short, literature evokes imaginative worlds through the conscious arrangement of words that tell a story. These stories are told through different genres, or types of literature, like novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and the essay. Each genre is associated with certain conventions. In this course, we will study poetry, short fiction, and drama (in the form of movies).

Some Misconceptions about Literature

Of course, there are a number of misconceptions about literature that have to be gotten out of the way before anyone can enjoy it. One misconception is that literature is full of  hidden meanings . There are certainly occasional works that contain hidden meanings. The biblical book of  Revelation , for example, was written in a kind of code, using images that had specific meanings for its early audience but that we can only recover with a great deal of difficulty. Most literary works, however, are not at all like that. Perhaps an analogy will illustrate this point. When I take my car to my mechanic because something is not working properly, he opens the hood and we both stand there looking at the engine. But after we have looked for a few minutes, he is likely to have seen what the problem is, while I could look for hours and never see it. We are looking at the same thing. The problem is not hidden, nor is it in some secret code. It is right there in the open, accessible to anyone who knows how to “read” it, which my mechanic does and I do not. He has been taught how to “read” automobile engines and he has practiced “reading” them. He is a good “close reader,” which is why I continue to take my car to him.

The same thing is true for readers of literature. Generally authors want to communicate with their readers, so they are not likely to hide or disguise what they are saying, but reading literature also requires some training and some practice. Good writers use language very carefully, and readers must learn how to be sensitive to that language, just as the mechanic must learn to be sensitive to the appearances and sounds of the engine. Everything that the writer wants to say, and much that the writer may not be aware of, is there in the words. We simply have to learn how to read them.

Another popular misconception is that a literary work has a  single “meaning”  (and that only English teachers know how to find that meaning). There is an easy way to dispel this misconception. Just go to a college library and find the section that holds books on Shakespeare. Choose one play,  Hamlet , for example, and see how many books there are about it, all by scholars who are educated, perceptive readers. Can it be the case that one of these books is correct and all the others are mistaken? And if the correct one has already been written, why would anyone need to write another book about the play? The answer is this:

Key Takeaways

There is no single correct way to read any piece of literature. 

Again, let me use an analogy to illustrate this point. Suppose that everyone at a meeting were asked to describe a person who was standing in the middle of the room. Imagine how many different descriptions there would be, depending on where the viewer sat in relation to the person. For example, an optometrist in the crowd might focus on the person’s glasses; a hair stylist might focus on the person’s haircut; someone who sells clothing might focus on the style of dress; a podiatrist might focus on the person’s feet. Would any of these descriptions be incorrect? Not necessarily, but they would be determined by the viewers’ perspectives. They might also be determined by such factors as the viewers’ ages, genders, or ability to move around the person being viewed, or by their previous acquaintance with the subject. So whose descriptions would be correct? Conceivably all of them, and if we put all of these correct descriptions together, we would be closer to having a full description of the person.

This is most emphatically NOT to say, however, that all descriptions are correct simply because each person is entitled to his or her opinion

If the podiatrist is of the opinion that the person is five feet, nine inches tall, the podiatrist could be mistaken. And even if the podiatrist actually measures the person, the measurement could be mistaken. Everyone who describes this person, therefore, must offer not only an opinion but also a basis for that opinion. “My feeling is that this person is a teacher” is not enough. “My feeling is that this person is a teacher because the person’s clothing is covered with chalk dust and because the person is carrying a stack of papers that look like they need grading” is far better, though even that statement might be mistaken.

So it is with literature. As we read, as we try to understand and interpret, we must deal with the text that is in front of us ; but we must also recognize (1) that language is slippery and (2) that each of us individually deals with it from a different set of perspectives. Not all of these perspectives are necessarily legitimate, and it is always possible that we might misread or misinterpret what we see. Furthermore, it is possible that contradictory readings of a single work will both be legitimate, because literary works can be as complex and multi-faceted as human beings. It is vital, therefore, that in reading literature we abandon both the idea that any individual’s reading of a work is the “correct” one and the idea that there is one simple way to read any work. Our interpretations may, and probably should, change according to the way we approach the work. If we read The Chronicles of Narnia as teenagers, then in middle age, and then in old age, we might be said to have read three different books. Thus, multiple interpretations, even contradictory interpretations, can work together to give us a fuller and possibly more interesting understanding of a work.

Why Reading Literature is Important

Reading literature can teach us new ways to read, think, imagine, feel, and make sense of our own experiences. Literature forces readers to confront the complexities of the world, to confront what it means to be a human being in this difficult and uncertain world, to confront other people who may be unlike them, and ultimately to confront themselves.

The relationship between the reader and the world of a work of literature is complex and fascinating. Frequently when we read a work, we become so involved in it that we may feel that we have become part of it. “I was really into that movie,” we might say, and in one sense that statement can be accurate. But in another sense it is clearly inaccurate, for actually we do not enter the movie or the story as IT enters US; the words enter our eyes in the form of squiggles on a page which are transformed into words, sentences, paragraphs, and meaningful concepts in our brains, in our imaginations, where scenes and characters are given “a local habitation and a name.” Thus, when we “get into” a book, we are actually “getting into” our own mental conceptions that have been produced by the book, which, incidentally, explains why so often readers are dissatisfied with cinematic or television adaptations of literary works.

In fact, though it may seem a trite thing to say, writers are close observers of the world who are capable of communicating their visions, and the more perspectives we have to draw on, the better able we should be to make sense of our lives. In these terms, it makes no difference whether we are reading a Homeric epic poem like The Odysse y, a twelfth-century Japanese novel like  The Tale of Genji , or a Victorian novel by Dickens, or even, in a sense, watching someone’s TikTok video (a video or movie is also a kind of text that can be “read” or analyzed for multiple meanings). The more different perspectives we get, the better. And it must be emphasized that we read such works not only to be well-rounded (whatever that means) or to be “educated” or for antiquarian interest. We read them because they have something to do with us, with our lives. Whatever culture produced them, whatever the gender or race or religion of their authors, they relate to us as human beings; and all of us can use as many insights into being human as we can get. Reading is itself a kind of experience, and while we may not have the time or the opportunity or  or physical possibility  to experience certain things in the world, we can experience them through reading. So literature allows us to broaden our experiences.

Reading also forces us to focus our thoughts. The world around us is so full of stimuli that we are easily distracted. Unless we are involved in a crisis that demands our full attention, we flit from subject to subject. But when we read a book, even a book that has a large number of characters and covers many years, the story and the writing help us to focus, to think about what they show us in a concentrated manner. When I hold a book, I often feel that I have in my hand another world that I can enter and that will help me to understand the everyday world that I inhabit.

Literature invites us to  meet interesting characters and to visit interesting places, to use our imagination and to think about things that might otherwise escape our notice, to see the world from perspectives that we would otherwise not have.

Watch this video for a discussion of why reading fiction matters.

How to Read Literature: The Basics

• Read with a pen in hand! Yes, even if you’re reading an electronic text, in which case you may want to open a new document in which you can take notes. Jot down questions, highlight things you find significant, mark confusing passages, look up unfamiliar words/references, and record first impressions.
• Think critically to form a response. Here are some things to be aware of and look for in the story that may help you form an idea of meaning.
• Repetitions . You probably know from watching movies that if something is repeated, that means something. Stories are similar—if something occurs more than once, the story is calling attention to it, so notice it and consider why it is repeated. The repeated element can be a word or a phrase, an action, even a piece of clothing or gear.
• Not Quite Right : If something that happens that seems Not Quite Right to you, that may also have some particular meaning. So, for example, if a violent act is committed against someone who’s done nothing wrong, that is unusual, unexpected, that is, Not Quite Right. And therefore, that act means something.
• Address your own biases and compare your own experiences with those expressed in the piece.
• Test your positions and thoughts about the piece with what others think (we’ll do some of this in class discussions).

While you will have your own individual connection to a piece based on your life experiences, interpreting literature is not a willy-nilly process. Each piece of writing has purpose, usually more than one purpose–you, as the reader, are meant to uncover purpose in the text. As the speaker notes in  the video you watched about how to read literature, you, as a reader, also have a role to play. Sometimes you may see something in the text that speaks to you; whether or not the author intended that piece to be there, it still matters to you.

For example, I’ve had a student who had life experiences that she was reminded of when reading “Chonguita, the Monkey Bride” and another student whose experience was mirrored in part of “The Frog King or Iron Heinrich.” I encourage you to honor these perceptions if they occur to you and possibly even to use them in your writing assignments. I can suggest ways to do this if you’re interested.

But remember that when we write about literature, our observations must also be supported by the text itself. Make sure you aren’t reading into the text something that isn’t there. Value the text for what is and appreciate the experience it provides, all while you attempt to create a connection with your experiences.

Attributions:

• Content written by Dr. Karen Palmer and licensed  CC BY NC SA .
• Content adapted from  Literature, the Humanities, and Humanity  by Theodore L. Steinberg and licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Worry Free Writer  by Dr. Karen Palmer is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Introduction to Literature Copyright © by Judy Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Why Study Literature?

Stacey Van Dahm

If you are here, reading this article, you might already know how important reading literature is. But if someone asks you, “Why study literature?” how would you answer? It’s an age-old question we once again face at a time when choosing what to study in college is tied to rather limited assumptions about what “success,” or a “good income,” or the very purpose of a college education actually is. In fact, the discussion about why we study literature is directly related to the general education or liberal arts curriculum at any institution of higher learning. These programs adhere to the notion (supported by research) that studying literature, philosophy, and art (i.e., the Humanities) makes us better people — more responsible, ethical, and civically engaged.

This is true, but that’s not exactly the conversation I want to have here. Instead, I want to start with a 200,000-year-old handprint.

In 2021, Archaeologists discovered the earliest known cave art in the Quesang village in the Tibetan Plateau. The hand- and footprints discovered, it turns out, were made by 7- and 12-year-old hominin species children [1] , somewhere between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago during the Middle Paleolithic period (Zhang et al). The journal Science Bulletin , originally publishing the findings, includes these two images of the prints:

I include the images because they help us to imagine the children, who “squished their hands and feet into sticky mud” (Lanese) to leave the prints deliberately, which opens up a fascinating question about whether or not this is “art.” Matthew Bennet, a professor of environmental and geographical sciences at Bournemouth University in Poole, England, likens the composition to the scribbling of a toddler that a parent might hang on the fridge as “art.” It is intentional and playful. The implication is that, as a deliberate composition, it is artistic.

One of the ways we might understand these handprints is to tell their story. It seems the children were together, playing in the mud. I imagine them enjoying the feeling of wet mud squishing between their toes and fingers, the smell of earth and leisure. Perhaps they were siblings or cousins or similarly related young people attached to the same band of Denisovans or Homo erectus. Maybe one of them, the youngest — after having observed the other for some time — stuck their foot in the mud and lifted it straight up, out of some interest, a curiosity. The other sees this and does the same, and before long, they are taking it in turns, nudging each other out of the way, to slowly fill up the space with various hand- and footprints. Perhaps, liking the results, they left those prints there. Or maybe they were wrenched away from this “play” suddenly, out of some necessity, never to return. Either way, they hardly could have imagined that 200,000 years later scientists would find the marks preserved by the slow-moving forces of geological fate, to be discovered and studied during the so-called Anthropocene period.

Some cave drawings more definitively categorized as “figurative art” date back about 40,000 years and are found in Indonesia. The depictions of hands made with a stencil technique, as if outlined “against a background of red paint,” or the figures of animals once common in the area, shifted our assumptions about the origins of art. Scientists understand these figures to be an indication of the “moment when the human mind, with its unique capacity for imagination and symbolism, switched on” (Marchant). To put this in other terms, we have long understood art to be a sign of something unique about human beings and their sensibility.

These examples trigger our own curiosity. What were these human ancestors trying to capture as they drew figures of themselves and animals? What kinds of rituals or rites of passage included marking walls with handprints? How did early humans imagine themselves and their surroundings? How did they imagine themselves in relation to others? Why did they feel compelled to express their experience in visual images and stories? Is our amazing ability to imagine and represent experience beyond the self a unique sign of humanity?

What we see in early artistic endeavor is, really, ourselves. And our thirst to understand the drawings and stories and relics of the past has very much to do with a quest to understand human experience and our own place in it. In fact, the creation of stories, narratives, is very much about making meaning of the world, as explained in Clint Johnson’s, “ What Is Story ?”

Indeed, the story that I’ve told you so far is really a way to make sense of something. In fact, you will notice that the telling of this story included some make-believe — an anecdote of young people playing in mud — but also lots of other modes of inquiry and knowledge building: anthropology, geology, biology, and paleontology, for example.

My argument is that literary study is important because it is one more form of studying the artifacts of people over time, the kinds of artifacts that help us understand ourselves in historical context. Literary study is the study of the stories people have told about human experience throughout time. Cave drawings, like stories, suggest the centrality of aesthetic sensibility to human experience. They trigger our curiosity , and they show us we have a deep and connected human history that demonstrates a compulsion to create and leave a mark. Literary art is like that handprint in the mud; it is the imprint of a mind, a sensibility captured in artistic creation composed of words.

Literary study awakens our aesthetic sensibility.

It may be surprising that a handprint in the mud can inspire aesthetic wonder. But many of us have been moved by literary images that unfold before us as we read. These images are powerful because they happen in our minds and hearts. It is one of the ways that the experiences of literary characters become deeply embedded in our own emotional lives. Aesthetic experiences make us feel.

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with passages that evoke a sense of beauty both through imagistic descriptions and the kinds of human experiences they are attached to. The novel tells the story of a family over multiple generations in a small town in Columbia called Macondo. The death of José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch of the family and the founder of the community, is represented in a way that evokes the gravity of the loss:

Entonces entraron al cuarto de José Arcadio Buendía, lo sacudieron con todas sus fuerzas, le gritaron al oído, le pusieron un espejo frente a las fosas nasales, pero no pudieron despertarlo. Poco después, cuando el carpintero le tomaba las medidas para el ataúd, vieron a través de la ventana que estaba cayendo una llovizna de minúsculas flores amarillas. Cayeron toda la noche sobre el pueblo en una tormenta silenciosa, y cubrieron los techos y atascaron las puertas, y sofocaron a los animales que durmieron a la intemperie. Tantas flores cayeron del cielo, que las calles amanecieron tapizadas de una colcha compacta, y tuvieron que despejarlas con palas y rastrillos para que pudiera pasar el entierro. ( Cien Años 166)

Then they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by. ( One Hundred Years 140)

The passage, beautiful in both Spanish and English, conveys the enormity of the loss in a surprising, magical scene that combines wonder and sadness. Falling yellow flowers make the loss visible, shared, throughout the whole community. It seems as if a higher power is responding to death with a “tormenta silenciosa,” a “silent storm” that blankets the town. The way that Gabriel García Márquez juxtaposes death with beauty in this scene touches our own sense of loss, uniting the literary image of grief with our own understanding of suffering. Falling yellow flowers remind us that suffering loss is always paired first with having loved.

These kinds of literary images live within us after we read a book, and they color our vision of the world and our ways of interacting with it.

Literary study activates our curiosity.

Literature also drives us to get answers to our questions, to ask and to explore. This is one of the things people mean when they say that literature “opens our minds.” When we are curious, we engage with the world by asking questions and listening carefully and thoughtfully to the answers we encounter. This way of facing life makes it much harder to judge others and shut out new ideas, and it makes it much easier to understand things that are unfamiliar.

A short story published in 2016 by Helen Oyeyemi, “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” is filled with curiosities. Some of the main characters in the story are … puppets — puppets who manipulate their handlers and each other with the verve of jealous children and the intensity of young lovers. The story defies simple explanation, but we see from the start that desire will be a driving force in the story when the main character, Rhada Chaudhry, a schoolgirl, meets another central character, Myrna Semyonova, and becomes determined to win her heart. She sets out to do so by telling stories. “I discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple: If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me …” (101). This desire initiates a metaphor of storytelling as an alternating current that animates both the teller and the listener. And it pricks our curiosity. Will she get the girl? 

As it turns out, this isn’t the right question. This story makes us curious by defying our expectations. It seems like a romance, but Oyeyemi’s love tangle becomes secondary when the story shifts to center puppetry, a surprising form of storytelling. Puppets, directed and manipulated by a puppeteer, enact stories, but in Oyeyemi’s world, when one small puppet asks, “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” the puppet master disappears, and with them, so do readers’ assumptions about how stories work. At first, Rhada joins Myrna’s puppet school saying, “I don’t feel one hundred percent sure that I’m not a puppet myself” (108). But soon, Rhada’s puppet, Gepetta, takes over the narration of the story, commenting on Rhada’s crushes, telling the history of enigmatic puppet, Rowan, with whom she listens to music while riding night buses since, she says, “neither of us needs sleep” (129). As the puppets manipulate their handlers and overtake our imaginations, we readers find ourselves delightfully lost. We are no longer in a romance or a puppet show. Eventually, someone, perhaps a jealous and long-suffering puppet, orchestrates a crime that exposes all the characters’ hidden suffering, fear, and desire. The story suggests that we are just as likely to be manipulated in the stories of our lives, pulled by the strings we pretend are not there. 

This is a story that raises many questions about the human condition. How do my assumptions about stories blind me to how I’m reading? What expectations and assumptions do I hold that cause me to misinterpret others? Is it possible for me to truly see others or for them to see me? Why are we so unaware of the suffering and pain of those around us? To what extent do my own desires and hidden fears hold me back?  

Literature piques our interest in both the magic of a fantastic tale and the complexity of human experience. In this case, literature makes us curious about our own choices and our own behavior in the face of human fragility, including our own.

Literary study also deepens our historical and critical perspective.

You likely remember learning about another historical period through reading. Literary texts draw readers into a time and place different from our own. Immersed in a literary world, we discover the values, beliefs, and systems that shape human behavior. Reading literature opens us to a critical examination of our shared humanity with fictional others.

In Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas’ novel Hallucinations , the author explores critical issues of religious and political oppression through a fantastical story about the struggle for Mexican independence from Spain. In it, he uses hyperbolic and outrageous depictions of the Spanish Inquisition as a metaphor for the brutality of colonial systems of power. Near the opening of the novel, Arenas includes descriptions of the Inquisitorial pyres that “burned night and day at the end of every street, so that heat and soot were perpetual in the city and on summer days made it unbearable” (14). His exaggerated descriptions include mobs “crowded about the flames” (14), lines of people waiting to be burned in the fires, and protesters choosing to die “an unchristian death, without the final benefaction conferred by confession” just to flout “the orders of the Holy Inquisition” (15).  In order to highlight the absurdity of abusive power and passive obedience, Arenas depicts the hypocrisy of church leaders condemning people to the punishment of the church for the sake of political power and the abuse of the most humble members of society, especially the Native Americans, whom the church claims to be there to save.

There is no way to read these passages of historical fiction without critically examining the truth of these historical events. Was the Spanish Inquisition truly this brutal? How many people were condemned to death? To what extent were these choices, played out in colonial cities, actually about solidifying power for individuals, for governments? How did spiritual manipulation affect the outcome of the conquest in Latin America? How did this historical moment shape the world as we know it today? For Arenas, the biggest question seems to be about how the desires and fears of just one person can influence choices and actions that change the lives of multitudes, even the direction of history.

When we encounter literary events that touch our own sense of shared humanity, we ask critical questions about the world around us. In this way, literature helps us to build an historical understanding of everyday life. Literature helps us critically examine such choices and how we, like the characters we love, might also be susceptible to the forces of desire that determine the course of history: the contradictions of fear and love, desire and humility, or pride and compassion.

Why study literature?

For many of us, reading brings great pleasure. But when it comes to college, studying literature makes us better people. That claim might seem overstated, but it is not. When we gain awareness of our aesthetic sensibility, we live in the knowledge that part of what makes us human, part of what we share with all people, is a need for beauty and an urge to create it. When our curiosity is sparked by a literary image, a moving theme, or the complex contradictions of human behavior, we become better at investigating the world around us. And when literature immerses us in another’s experience and another world, we become more able to critically examine our own lives and our own behavior. Studying literature makes us more human, more humane.

Works Cited

Arenas, Reinaldo. Hallucinations: Or, the Ill-fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando . Translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin. 2002.

García Márquez, Gabriel.  Cien Años de Soledad.  Madrid: Alfaguara, 2007.

García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitud e. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Harper Perennial, 2006. 

Lanese, Nicoletta. “Kids’ Fossilized Handprints May Be Some of the World’s Oldest Art.”  Scientific American , 21 Sept. 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kids-fossilized-handprints-may-be-some-of-the-worlds-oldest-art/ . Accessed 15 Dec. 2022. 

Marchant, Jo. “A Journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the World.” Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 2016 ,  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journey-oldest-cave-paintings-world-180957685/ . Accessed 15 Dec. 2022.

Oyeyemi, Helen. “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours . Riverhead Books, 2016. 95-151. 

Zhang, David D., et al. “Earliest Parietal Art: Hominin Hand and Foot Traces from the Middle Pleistocene of Tibet.” Science Bulletin , vol. 66, no. 24, Dec. 2021, pp. 2506–15. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.libprox1.slcc.edu/10.1016/j.scib.2021.09.001 . 

• These were a subspecies of archaic humans thought to be either Denisovans or Homo erectus. ↵

About the author

name: Stacey Van Dahm

Stacey Van Dahm has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and she teaches composition, literature, and cultural studies courses at Salt Lake Community College.

Literary Studies @ SLCC Copyright © 2023 by Stacey Van Dahm is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
• Vague sentences
• Style consistency

See an example

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

Open Google Slides Download PowerPoint

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, September 11). How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved August 26, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

Other students also liked, what is a theoretical framework | guide to organizing, what is a research methodology | steps & tips, how to write a research proposal | examples & templates, "i thought ai proofreading was useless but..".

I've been using Scribbr for years now and I know it's a service that won't disappoint. It does a good job spotting mistakes”

You are using an outdated browser. This site may not look the way it was intended for you. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience and security.

London School of Journalism

• Tel: +44 (0) 20 7432 8140
• [email protected]
• Student log in

Search courses

English literature essays, an english literature essay archive, written by our students, with subjects ranging from shakespeare to artistotle, and from dickens to hemingway, essay subjects in alphabetical order:.

• Aristotle: Poetics

Margaret Atwood

Margaret atwood 'gertrude talks back'.

• Matthew Arnold

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

• Jonathan Bayliss
• Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett
• Saul Bellow and Ken Kesey
• Castiglione: The Courtier
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
• Kate Chopin: The Awakening
• T S Eliot, Albert Camus
• Charles Dickens
• John Donne: Love poetry
• John Dryden: Translation of Ovid
• T S Eliot: Four Quartets
• Henry Fielding
• William Faulkner: Sartoris
• Graham Greene: Brighton Rock
• Ibsen, Lawrence, Galsworthy
• Jonathan Swift and John Gay
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Ernest Hemingway
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

• Carl Gustav Jung

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• Jon Jost: American independent film-maker
• Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming
• Rudyard Kipling: Kim
• D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love

Henry Lawson: 'Eureka!'

• Ian McEwan: The Cement Garden
• Jennifer Maiden: The Winter Baby
• Machiavelli: The Prince
• Toni Morrison: Beloved and Jazz

R K Narayan

• R K Narayan: The English Teacher
• R K Narayan: The Guide
• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
• Brian Patten
• Harold Pinter
• Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

• Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene
• Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
• Shakespeare: Coriolanus
• Shakespeare: Hamlet
• Shakespeare: Measure for Measure

Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Women

Shakespeare: the winter's tale and the tempest.

• Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
• Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella
• Tom Stoppard

William Styron: Sophie's Choice

• William Wordsworth

Miscellaneous

• Alice, Harry Potter and the computer game

Indian women's writing

• New York! New York!
• Photography and the New Native American Aesthetic
• Renaissance poetry
• Renaissance tragedy and investigator heroes
• Romanticism
• Studying English Literature
• The Age of Reason
• The author, the text, and the reader
• The Spy in the Computer
• What is literary writing?
• Margaret Atwood: Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale
• Margaret Atwood 'Gertrude Talks Back'
• John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Will McManus
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ian Mackean
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ben Foley
• Henry Lawson: 'Eureka!'
• R K Narayan's vision of life
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Doubles
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Symbolism
• Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Women
• Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale and The Tempest
• William Wordsworth and Lucy
• Indian women's writing

We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

An essay on the study of literature

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

Download options.

For users with print-disabilities

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by Unknown on February 20, 2009

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Eco Criticism › Ecocriticism: An Essay

Ecocriticism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 27, 2016 • ( 3 )

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader , edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm , and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.

Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in literature. It deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals in ecocriticism is to study how individuals in society behave and react in relation to nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has gained a lot of attention during recent years due to higher social emphasis on environmental destruction and increased technology. It is hence a fresh way of analyzing and interpreting literary texts, which brings new dimensions to the field of literary and theoritical studies. Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including “green (cultural) studies”, “ecopoetics”, and “environmental literary criticism.”

Western thought has often held a more or less utilitarian attitude to nature —nature is for serving human needs. However, after the eighteenth century, there emerged many voices that demanded a revaluation of the relationship between man and environment, and man’s view of nature. Arne Naess , a Norwegian philosopher, developed the notion of “Deep Ecology” which emphasizes the basic interconnectedness of all life forms and natural features, and presents a symbiotic and holistic world-view rather than an anthropocentric one.

Earlier theories in literary and cultural studies focussed on issue of class, race, gender, region are criteria and “subjects”of critical analysis. The late twentieth century has woken up to a new threat: ecological disaster. The most important environmental problems that humankind faces as a whole are: nuclear war, depletion of valuable natural resources, population explosion, proliferation of exploitative technologies, conquest of space preliminary to using it as a garbage dump, pollution, extinction of species (though not a human problem) among others. In such a context, literary and cultural theory has begun to address the issue as a part of academic discourse. Numerous green movements have sprung up all over the world, and some have even gained representations in the governments.

Large scale debates over “dumping,” North versus South environmentalism (the necessary differences between the en-vironmentalism of the developed and technologically advanced richer nations—the North, and the poorer, subsistence environmentalism of the developing or “Third World”—the South). Donald Worster ‘s Nature’s Economy (1977) became a textbook for the study of ecological thought down the ages. The historian Arnold Toynbee recorded the effect of human civilisation upon the land and nature in his monumental, Mankind and Mother Earth (1976). Environmental issues and landscape use were also the concern of the Annales School of historians , especially Braudel and Febvre. The work of environmental historians has been pathbreaking too. Rich-ard Grove et al’s massive Nature and the Orient (1998), David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha’s Nature, Culture, Imperialism (1995) have been significant work in the environmental history of India and Southeast Asia. Ramachandra Guha is of course the most important environmental historian writing from India today.

Various versions of environmentalism developed.Deep ecology and ecofeminism were two important developments. These new ideas questioned the notion of “development” and “modernity,” and argued that all Western notions in science, philosophy, politics were “anthropocentric” (human-centred) and “androcentric”(Man/male-centred). Technology, medical science with its animal testing, the cosmetic and fashion industry all came in for scrutiny from environmentalists. Deep ecology, for instance, stressed on a “biocentric” view (as seen in the name of the environmentalist group, “ Earth First! !”).

Ecocriticism is the result of this new consciousness: that very soon, there will be nothing beautiful (or safe) in nature to discourse about, unless we are very careful.

Ecocritics ask questions such as: (1) How is nature represented in the novel/poem/play ? (2) What role does the physical-geographical setting play in the structure of the novel? (3) How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? That is, what is the link between pedagogic or creative practice and actual political, sociocultural and ethical behaviour towards the land and other non-human life forms? (4) How is science —in the form of genetic engineering, technologies of reproduction, sexualities—open to critical scrutiny terms of the effects of science upon the land?

The essential assumptions, ideas and methods of ecocritics may be summed up as follows. (1) Ecocritics believe that human culture is related to the physical world. (2) Ecocriticism assumes that all life forms are interlinked. Ecocriticism expands the notion of “the world” to include the entire ecosphere. (3) Moreover, there is a definite link between nature and culture, where the literary treatment, representation and “thematisation” of land and nature influence actions on the land. (4) Joseph Meeker in an early work, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972) used the term “literary ecology” to refer to “the study of biological themes and relationships which appear in literary works. It is simultaneously an attempt to discover what roles have been played by literature in the ecology of the human species.” (5) William Rueckert is believed to have coined the term “ecocriticism” in 1978, which he defines as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”

Source: Literary Theory Today,Pramod K Nair

Share this:

Categories: Eco Criticism

Tags: Annales School , Arne Naess , Arnold Toynbee , Cheryll Glotfelty , Deep Ecology , Earth First! , Ecocriticism , green studies , Harold Fromm , Literary Theory , Mankind and Mother Earth , Nature and the Orient , Nature's Economy , The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology , The Ecocriticism Reader , The Environmental Imagination

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

It appears you have javascript disabled. Please enable javascript to get the full experience of gustavus.edu

Why study literature.

Literature helps us better understand our lives, ourselves, and the world around us. Encounters with literature develop the concepts of identification, imagination, and empathy. In our increasingly chaotic world, these skills matter deeply. Taking a deep dive into literature from different cultures allows you to both expand your ability to evaluate and discuss the work itself and also better understand what it tells us about the world, our own beliefs and values, and the beliefs and values of others.

Literature is for everyone, no matter what your future major or career may be. Studying literature tests your creative mind, inspiring innovation and change. Literature helps us use our written language as a practical, everyday tool that enlightens, educates, and inspires those who interact with it.

Practical Skills Gained Through the Study of Literature

Let’s start with what may not be obvious, through the study of literature you develop practical skills that are applicable to a wide variety of careers. Writing, research, and class discussions develops skills such as developing persuasive arguments, carrying out analysis, and communication in an articulate manner, all of which are important to professional success.

When you study literature with Gustavus Adolphus, you’ll don’t just read old books and write essays. For instance, you’ll learn to present with a small group, plan and lead discussions, collaborate on activities, and work with off-campus organizations. You’ll build skills such as writing and summarizing complex information in a concise way. You’ll dive into readings and films to develop your ability to detect and analyze important details. 

While you might not associate any of these skills specifically with the study of literature, the truth is that literature is a fascinating subject with multiple transferable skills useful across career paths from business and arts to the sciences and trades. 

A recent survey conducted on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) found that the majority of hiring managers prioritize prospective employees who have skills that a literature degree can provide. Nearly all who were surveyed (an impressive 93%) agree that “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.” A literature degree offers all of these skills — and more. 

Thus in the English Department  at Gustavus Adolphus, you’ll take courses through the study of literature that develop the skills that employers in all types of industries are looking for.

Get more information about studying literature at Gustavus Adolphus .

Why Do We Study Literature?

Beyond thinking only about the practical skills to land you a job after college, studying literature is a meaningful endeavor. Simply put, engaging with literary works written by people from various cultures, viewpoints, and historical periods broadens our understanding of other people and our overall worldview.

The study of literature also exercises your critical thinking skills that can be used in all aspects of your life and in any career. The experience of studying and discussing literature in a classroom prepares you to think critically on your own about areas such as film, news, and social media, sparking new conversations and raising insightful questions. 

Understanding Human Nature Through Literature

One of the most widely used forms of expression is the written word, and it has been for centuries. Whether you’re engrossed in the drama of an ancient play or a compelling contemporary novel, you can notice parallels between the characters and our own behavior and current events. 

Great literature also teaches us about significant life issues. From the beginning, we are raised on stories of struggle: humans against a vast array of challenges, whether they be other people, nature, or one’s own self. The struggle against a challenge is central to literature. By reading and analyzing the material you grow your understanding of why humans create conflict, how it can be resolved, and what you can do to ensure preservation for yourself, others, and the world around you.

Empathy and Emotional Growth: The Significance of Literature in Our Lives

Literature allows us a window into places, people, and situations we wouldn’t be able to experience otherwise. Literature can transport you to another time and place without ever having to leave your room. You experience these stories simply by reading them; imagining them to life in your mind. The feelings evoked, whether sad, angry, inspired, or blissfully happy, are ours to share with the characters in the book. 

Literary studies also help us develop a stronger sense of who we are and how we act in any given situation. In a 2023 study , researchers found that students with a higher reading ability level had better social-emotional skills than those at a comparatively lower reading level. While scientists are still working on the link between regular reading and empathy levels, there’s one thing we can say for sure: literature can stir emotions deep within us.

The Value of Studying Literature: A Comprehensive Approach

Literature is a concrete way to wake up our senses and bring the world into sharper focus. Studying literature can help us to observe the things around us — sharpening our ability to listen and hear, smell, taste, and touch. 

Literature deepens our thinking by bringing more awareness of our own values and worldview, but also those of others throughout the world and throughout history. Because literature illustrates concepts in a vivid manner, we can observe differing values and worldviews in action. Literature allows us to explore the implications of various values and worldviews and gives us an excellent opportunity to take a closer look at our own assumptions about the world and compare them with others. 

Crossing Cultural Boundaries: The Role of Writing and Literature

Literature broadens your horizons. Cross-cultural literary studies teach you how to read and interpret complex texts, write persuasive interpretations, and use theoretical frames for literary and cultural interpretation. 

Writing and literature join together to teach the importance of understanding imaginative works within their cultural and historical contexts. Studying the literary traditions of different cultures around the world provides you with a deeper understanding of what a culture's literature says about its people's values and world views. Specialized courses offer a more in-depth look at different groups of writers, time periods, countries, cultures, and writing styles.

Exploring the Connection Between Creative Writing and Studying Literature

Creative writing is the imaginative and expressive use of language to convey stories, ideas, and emotions. Unlike other forms of writing that primarily focus on conveying information, creative writing emphasizes originality and the ability to captivate readers through narrative innovation. It encompasses various genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction, allowing writers to explore a diverse range of styles and themes. In this field, writers often draw inspiration from their personal experiences, observations, or sheer imagination, crafting unique worlds and characters that resonate with readers.

Studying literature provides inspiration and examples for the creative writer. Creative writing in turn nurtures the development of literary skills.

English Degrees in Literature

A literature degree offers a wealth of invaluable skills in both writing and research as well as provides a unique insight into the human mind. A degree in literature is considered excellent preparation for industries from finance to law. The Gustavus Adolphus English Department offers degree programs in: 

• English with a Literature and Film Track 
• English with a Multi-Ethnic and Global Literatures and Film Track 
• Communication Arts/Literature Teaching 

Expand Your World: Literature at Gustavus Adolphus

In addition to those enrolled in English degree programs, students from all majors are encouraged to take a literature class or two during their time at Gustavus. Each course allows you the chance to explore areas that interest you the most, whether that’s U.S. Indigenous Literatures or African Digital Literatures. It’s up to you! 

Regardless of where your interests lie, you’ll be inspired by knowledgeable, innovative faculty during your literary studies in the English Department at Gustavus Adolphus. Working with world-class English and literature faculty prepares you to make a positive impact on your community, your life, and those surrounding you. Get started on your own path today at Gustavus Adolphus College.

Schedule a campus tour today.

Why Our Students Study Literature

Students from all backgrounds find that their literature studies open their minds to unique perspectives and give them real-world skills — useful no matter what their major may be. Check out what our students have to say about how studying literature at Gustavus has influenced their approach to literature, education, and life.

"Creative writing has been a happy part of my life since I first learned to hold a pencil, so once I chose Gustavus, I considered my career as an English major a given. Perhaps I am a rare bird for that, being so sure of myself so soon. But I could not have anticipated how much I learned about the value of reading, in every area of life, through the English major; nor did I see its potential to shape me as a writer. No matter how straightforward a story may seem, the search for something deeper within it leads to all kinds of insights that, while perhaps not in line with the author's original intent (who knows?), teach you more about the world and the different ways people use language. The theory taught alongside literature, in combination with this analysis, gives you the power of perspective that is so essential to finding contentment and peace in communication with people who are different from you, in a way that is unique to the study of literature. To write you have to read, and to really read, you have to think, criticize, doubt, wonder, and stand amazed by words on the page. The English major showed me how to do that, and not only has it increased my skills as a writer, it has made me a more compassionate and honest person."

—Caitlin Skvorc

"I study literature because I believe there is power in stories. Literature is both intensely personal as well as a communal experience. I love examining how words, sentences, characters, plot lines, and tropes reveal who we are as humans. Humanity is a complicated thing and requires an infinite amount of words to describe and analyze. That's the joy of studying literature, there is always a new reality to discover."

—Mikaela Warner

"For me, the decision to study literature has been a struggle. Since I was young, I always enjoyed reading and being read to, but I always considered the actual study of literature to be made up; seriously, poets don’t actually try to "invoke" some other work. Literary devices? Some make-believe stuff that people invented to make English seem scientific. Although I enjoyed it, literature, to me, was studied only by those who weren’t smart enough to study something real, something provable.

As I understand it, those feelings are not uncommon. The difference for me, though (as compared to some other people I know), is that I grew out of them. I started really looking at rhetorical devices and the use of language. I started to see that, although it still was not science, it was art, and art is the greatest expression of that which is human. My goal is to learn as much as I can about the human condition, and what it really means to be human, in all aspects."

—David Lick

"By studying literature I find that this sense of confusion and search for self-discovery is a common theme. I am confident that my choice to be an English major is one that I will be satisfied with. Thus far, to be an English major entails more than just being able to read and write well. An English major must also strive to understand and interpret the importance that various forms of literature have had on the society of the past and the present. Being able to express opinions is another important aspect, as is starting a piece of literature with an open mind. These habits are also important when facing everyday life, not just literature.

The chance to read and write is something that everyone should be able to experience. Literature in all forms is everywhere in today’s society, and with this idea, it is clear just how important it is. Whether it is studied in the classroom, or read for pleasure or purpose, literature is a central part of many lives. It offers not only a chance to enlighten a person, but it also gives the chance to broaden one’s horizons and perspectives. In my case, having the opportunity to study literature in two different languages has helped me to find similarities in two different cultures, and to also find that although literature varies in form and content, it is important and it is a central part of many lives."

—Stephanie Conroy

"Reading and writing, the basic principles involved in the study of English, serve as the gateway to a deeper level of thought. After mastering these elementary skills, comprehension, analysis, and interpretation are learned and used to better educate oneself. Studying literature and observing personal reactions to the literature can make one more aware of his or her own values. English skills are helpful in every area of life. Reading, writing, comprehension, analysis, and interpretation increase efficiency in multiple ways including communication, documentation in other areas of study, and reflection of personal values. I believe there is no area of study that English and communication skills do not influence."

—Maria Freund

"Reading and writing, in general, are undoubtedly some of the most valuable skills one can have; obviously, having these skills makes it much easier for people to communicate and to participate in society. However, there exists a purpose for reading and writing outside of these immediate practical purposes; the written word can be used to enlighten, to persuade, to express emotion, or simply for enjoyment. In these forms the written word becomes an art form, and a way of reaching out to others through a personal experience between the writer and the reader. Reading is an excellent way to associate oneself with the great minds of history and peer into their own thoughts. Reading is surely one of the most effective ways one can expand oneself.

Literature is a way in which we can capture and interpret what has happened and is happening to us personally and to the world as a whole. An entire culture exists in the written word, documenting the collective thoughts of everyone who cared to share them with the world. Therefore, I believe that for one to truly be a part of human society, it is critical that one take part in the evolution and self-realization that is literature, even if only in the reading aspect. Writing, however, carries a grave importance, as literature simply would not exist in the accessible form it does without written word, and for that reason I believe all who can write should. One should take advantage of the great opportunity to be part of and contribute to the world and society in which he or she lives through writing. I see literature in the societal sense as a collective struggle to understand and make the best of the lives that we have all been given. Literature serves as a way to enrich our minds, and presents a way to improve the world not only through the beauty of its presence but through the ideas and tangible possibilities it possesses."

—Matt Beachey

"The best of my English teachers taught us literature because they wanted the art of it to expand our minds and help teach us new ways of seeing the world. I was taught to both see a work of literature as a way to understand the time it was written, and the people who produced it, and to find the parts of that work that spoke to me in my time and place. While I am skeptical about whether or not anyone can ever really understand a culture or a time prior to their own, I do know that many times literature and art provide insights that cold hard facts do not. Most of all I find that literature makes the differences more manageable and highlights the similarities between people. I can read a Greek tragedy two thousand years later and agree with things that some older white man was saying because he was a human being, and I am a human being. Although it may sound trite, I have had reading experiences that taught me more about what it means to live in this world.

Not everyone loves reading enough to do it in their spare time, but the people who do are the ones who get the most benefit out of what they read because they want to be there in that world that literature creates. I have met very intelligent people who do not read. But all of the interesting people I know read, whether or not they are particularly intelligent."

—Sybylla Yeoman Hendrix

"I read literature for a number of different reasons. Literature is an art full of passion and heart; it transcends the ages. Great literature hits on many different levels. Over the years authors have accomplished unfeasible tasks through the use of their words. Literature has prompted political and social change in societies and continues to do so to this day. It can be a battle cry for the proletariat to rise up and make a difference, and it can also provide personal counsel.

Literature sets me free from the responsibilities of this world, and at the same time, it ties me down to those same responsibilities. Some literature I read for an escape; to journey to a faraway land and go on a grand adventure with creatures beyond my imagination. Other literature has much more serious subject matter, and I read it to remind myself that life isn’t all cupcakes and ice cream."

—Ryan McGinty

"To me, literature is about the obsession with ideas. We read literature to discover and to learn about ideas and we write it to discover and to cultivate our own ideas. No lover of ideas can go without either reading or writing. For me, if I go too long without one or the other, I get this huge build-up of confused and jumbled ideas that suddenly overcome me and I just have to write them out in some form (philosophic prose, narrative, poetry, scribbled phrases, etc.). That must be why literature can appear in a multitude of forms: be it poetry or prose, the sonnet or the novel, the sestina or the short story, etc. All literature shares the common theme of the idea. Ideas explore, probe, inquire, and inspire. The reactions to such are all that become a part of the learning process. There is a great deal that literature can teach. Literature can teach to the individual and to all of society. It can teach us about the past and the present and even about the future. Subjects can be broad and far-reaching, but can also be specific. Literature teaches us about laughter and love, about remembering and forgetting. It can create emotion and warn us against our many human faults. It can attempt to disprove other ideas or attempt to find truth. I think we are all looking to find truth in some form or another. Oftentimes, the uncertainty of a specific meaning of a piece allows for its interpretation to be for the reader to decide. What is certain, however, is that there are things to be learned from literature that are specific to it, that cannot be attained through any other medium. To gather this knowledge and to experience its beauty all pertain to the importance of literature to me."

—Abby Travis

"Another reason that I enjoy reading so much is the places you can go to when you read. I know that that sounds pretty corny, like something on a PBS commercial, but I feel that there are a vast amount of experiences and people the reader gets to encounter in any work of literature."

—Stefan Kolis

"Although I concede that it is not absolutely necessary to major in English in order to gain perspective from literature, I feel that English is a good lens through which to view the world, both present and past. When I study a great work of literature, I not only gain insight into the universal truth about which the author has chosen to write, but I also, in my attempts to understand, can learn about the culture in which the author lived, the history surrounding the country of his origin, and the various intellectual, political, and artistic movements of the time. Thus the window to humanity that lies at the heart of all literature can act as a sort of connecting portal to the culture surrounding each individual author. The reader stands on the common ground of the universal truth around which a work is constructed – the point at which the reader’s world and the author’s meet – and begins to understand some of the motivations behind the author’s own quest for truth.

Great literature provides its readers with a window into various aspects of the human condition and a guide to the way we, as a species, relate to one another and to our surroundings. Literature gives us a mirror in which to examine our collective reflection as a people. It does not gloss over the pimples and blemishes of humanity, but exposes them quite openly. No concealer, no cover-up, only the truth. Literature is the reflecting pool into which every person that ever existed can look and see both his own face and the faces of all his fellow people. It enables each human to not only find the humanity within his own heart but also to connect him to the generations of other people who have been doing so since the beginning of time."

—Rebekah Schulz

• Science & Math
• Sociology & Philosophy
• Law & Politics
• Importance of Literature: Essay

What is Literature Essay

What is the Importance of Literature?

Literature is the foundation of life. It places an emphasis on many topics from human tragedies to tales of the ever-popular search for love. While it is physically written in words, these words come alive in the imagination of the mind, and its ability to comprehend the complexity or simplicity of the text. An essay about literature often explores these themes in depth, offering insight into how they resonate with readers.

The Importance of Literature in Our Life Essay

Literature enables people to see through the lenses of others, and sometimes even inanimate objects; therefore, it becomes a looking glass into the world as others view it. It is a journey that is inscribed in pages and powered by the imagination of the reader. Ultimately, literature has provided a gateway to teach the reader about life experiences from even the saddest stories to the most joyful ones that will touch their hearts. This is why understanding the importance of literature is crucial in any essay about literature.

The Journey into Literature

From a very young age, many are exposed to literature in the most stripped-down form: picture books and simple texts that are mainly for the sole purpose of teaching the alphabet etc. Although these are not nearly as complex as an 800-page sci-fi novel, it is the first step that many take towards the literary world. Progressively, as people grow older, they explore other genres of books, ones that propel them towards curiosity of the subject, and the overall book. These early encounters with books emphasize the importance of literature in our life, preparing individuals to appreciate and understand more complex works.

Literature and Empathy

Physically speaking, it is impossible to be someone else. It is impossible to switch bodies with another human being, and it is impossible to completely understand the complexity of their world. Literature, as an alternative, is the closest thing the world has to being able to understand another person whole-heartedly. For instance, a novel about a treacherous war, written from the perspective of a soldier, allows the reader to envision their memories, their pain, and their emotions without actually being that person. Consequently, literature can act as a time machine, enabling individuals to go into a specific time period of the story, into the mind and soul of the protagonist. This ability to foster empathy is a key point in any essay about literature.

Moral Lessons in Literature

With the ability to see the world with a pair of fresh eyes, it triggers the reader to reflect upon their own lives. Reading material that is relatable to the reader may teach them morals and encourage them to practice good judgment. This can be proven through public school systems, where the books that are emphasized the most tend to have a moral-teaching purpose behind the story. An example would be William Shakespeare’s stories, where each one is meant to be reflective of human nature – both the good and bad. Consequently, this can promote better judgment of situations, so the reader does not find themselves in the same circumstances as perhaps those in the fiction world. Henceforth, literature is proven to not only be reflective of life but it can also be used as a guide for the reader to follow and practice good judgment.

Literature in the Modern World

The world today is ever-changing. Never before has life been so chaotic and challenging for all. Life before literature was practical and predictable, but in the present day, literature has expanded into countless libraries and into the minds of many as the gateway for comprehension and curiosity of the human mind and the world around them. Literature is of great importance and is studied upon as it provides the ability to connect human relationships and define what is right and what is wrong. Therefore, words are alive more than ever before. Understanding what is the importance of literature can significantly enhance our appreciation of the world and the human condition.

In conclusion, literature is a powerful tool that shapes our understanding of life, morality, and human relationships. “A what is literature” essay can highlight the profound impact that written works have on individuals and societies. By exploring the importance of literature in our life essay components, we can appreciate its role in teaching empathy, moral lessons, and providing a deeper connection to the human experience.

Related Posts

• What are Archetypes in Literature
• Literary Essay: Peer Editing Guidelines
• Tips for Essay Writing
• Dystopian Literature Essay: The Hunger Games
• Essay Analysis Structure

17 Comments

Indeed literature is the foundation of life, people should know and appreciate these kind of things

its very useful info thanks

very helpful…..tnx

Hi, thanks!

First year student who wants to know about literature and how I can develop interest in reading novels.

Fantastic piece!

wonderful work

Literature is anything that is artistically presented through writtings or orally.

you may have tangible wealth untold, caskets of jewels and coffers of gold, richer than i you could never be, i know someone who told stories to me.

there’s a great saying that “the universe isn’t made up of at atoms, its made of stories” i hope none will argue this point, because this is the truest thing i have ever heard and its beautiful…….

I have learnt alot thanks to the topic literature.Literature is everything.It answers the questions why?,how? and what?.To me its my best and I will always treasure and embress literature to death.

I agree with the writer when says that Literature is the foundation of life. For me, reading is the most wonderful experience in life. It allows me to travel to other places and other times. I think that also has learnt me to emphathize with others, and see the world with other´s eyes and from their perspectives. I really like to read.

This is the first time i am presenting on a literature and i am surprised by the amount of people who are interested on the same subject. I regret my absence because i have missed much marvelous thing in that field.In fact literature is what is needed by the whole world,it brings the people of different culture together and by doing so it breaks the imposed barriers that divided people.My address now goes to the people of nowadays who prefer other source of entertainment like TV,i am not saying that TV is bad but reading is better of.COME BACK TO IT THEN.

literature is a mirror; a true reflection of our nature. it helps us see ourselves in a third persons point of view of first persons point of view. it instills virtues and condones vices. literature forms a great portion of fun and entertainment through plays, comedies and novels. it also educates individuals on life’s basic but delicate and sacred issues like love and death. it informs us of the many happenings and events that we would never have otherwise known about. literature also forms a source of livelihood to thousands of people, starting from writers,characters in plays, editors, printers,distributors and business people who deal with printed materials. literature is us and without it, we are void.

I believe that life without Literature would be unacceptable , with it i respect myself and loved human life . Next week i am going to make presentation about Literature, so i benefited from this essay.

Thanks a lot

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Post comment

Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation ? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

Current Issue

The Twists and Turns of Language

Natasha Trethewey’s life in poetry and prose

Natasha Trethewey’s Life in Poetry and Prose

A work of biography, an essay on literature and memory and the South, a prose poem full of lyrical dexterity, Trethewey’s latest book is like all of her others: a master study of the self.

If, as Zora Neale Hurston once argued, racial prejudice is a loss not for her but for those who embrace it, then one has to wonder how much the United States has forfeited on account of its perennial anti-Blackness. “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry,” Hurston wrote. “It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is sprinkled with wry aphorisms like this that slice through the layers of early-20th-century American racism. Riddled with anecdotes and Southern charm, it is also not only about Hurston celebrating her Blackness but turning the mirror back onto white Americans, who, she insists, miss a lot about themselves, too.

Books in review

The house of being.

The art of showing Americans what they have missed and who they are—in particular by offering acute portraits of the South—sits at the center of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry and prose. Her accolades alone testify to her acumen. She is a griot, a former US poet laureate, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But what has made her so vital to American literature is that she has cast back the image of a fragmented America to her readers not so much to affirm it as to offer a lament, much as Hurston did, for what has been lost—especially in the South.

This sense of hope and loss is fully displayed in her new book, The House of Being . Weaving together memoir and history, poetry and prose, intimate details from her life and more general observations about the South, the book is a testament to Trethewey’s command of language and her willingness to confront those difficult periods in her life that transformed her. A monologue, a work of biography, an essay on literature and memory, a prose poem full of lyrical dexterity, and a reflection on who she is in a society that has actively tried to partition people based on race, The House of Being is ultimately a study of maturation, of becoming an adult, and of how the early experiences of life can shape you for years to come.

Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, Trethewey begins her story at the beginning—with her parents’ marriage. Her Black mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was from Gulfport; her white father, Eric Trethewey, was from Canada. In 1967, an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, brought a Supreme Court case against Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, hoping that their marital union could be recognized—and to the surprise of many Americans, they won. But Turnbough and Trethewey had married two years earlier, and the poem “Miscegenation,” which their daughter republishes in The House of Being , captures what was at stake:

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi; they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

Trethewey’s subsequent birth, while not illegal in its own right, also posed a provocation to the Southern social order: For if her parents’ marriage was deemed illegitimate in the eyes of the State of Mississippi, so was young Natasha. White people in Mississippi would stare at her parents with detestation, and some would call her “mongrel” and “half-breed.” To overcome their animosity, young Trethewey turned to literature: “I learned then from the experience of Odysseus… that it would take cleverness to outpace whatever obstacles stood before me.” The twists and turns of language captivated her. The sinewy words of her mother and grandmother speaking African American vernacular sparked an unending interest in how humans express themselves. At the same time, she thought she could see how society’s racial hierarchies mapped onto the languages spoken around her.

Trethewey’s first home was an intergenerational amalgamation that included her parents and grandmother. Slightly outside Gulfport’s city limits, the family house was in a community once known as Griswold, land settled by formerly enslaved African Americans after the Civil War. It was in this vicinity that Trethewey and her parents were exposed to the fungibility of a semi-rural landscape: red-wing blackbirds soaring through the sky, cows grazing near her backyard, or even the “cracked shell on an old turtle.”

After her parents divorced, Natasha and her mother moved to Atlanta so that her mother could begin graduate school. While her memories of her father during these years were idyllic, those of her stepfather were different. He physically abused her mother, which Natasha only found out about years later—but even then, she sensed something was wrong, and in the years to come she would be haunted by it. As she writes in her poem “What Is Evidence,”

Not the fleeting bruises she’d cover with make-up, a dark patch as if imprint of a scope she’d pressed her eye too close to, looking for a way out

The worst, however, was still to come: In 1985, her stepfather murdered her mother. These moments of sorrow reappear and add to her unrelenting desire to write about her past.

From these early experiences in a South slowly shedding its Jim Crow past, the young Trethewey became an adult—and a writer. She not only understood “the sanctity of books” but felt at home through the concealments of metaphor and the ambiguities of language. In other words, she also became a poet.

Trethewey studied English literature at the University of Georgia and earned an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While her educational course might sound conventional for a contemporary writer, as one probes deeper into her story in The House of Being , one begins to see how unusual her literary education was. Along with her early exposure to her mother and grandmother’s way of speaking, she also had a poet in the family: her father. As a child, Trethewey recalls, her father would read stories to her that “must have taken root in my psyche, establishing early on the pattern to which my own journey would conform.”

The experiences of her mother in the South also contributed to Trethewey’s interest in writing and her skills as a poet. Her mother, she recalls in The House of Being , was always “showing me how to signify, how to use received forms to challenge the dominant cultural narrative of our native geography.”

Flannery O’Connor once wrote: “Where you came from is gone. Where you thought you were going to never was there. And where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” For Trethewey, the dislocation of her early years led her to find a home in the written word. Poetry became a way to create regions for herself; it was also a way to examine the cyclical anguish, the loss, the trauma, and the hopes of living in a region and a country more generally that was legally and then structurally defined by the experience of race.

Over the years, Trethewey became a memoirist and poet determined to render meaning out of these facts of her life. In her collection Thrall , she probed the afterlife of captivity. In Native Guard , she mourned her mother’s death and considered the Southern world they shared. Lines in her poetry tend to jostle between life and history, relationships and regions, the experience of race and the making of it. The death of her mother would in particular come to haunt her, and she turned to prose to make sense of that, as well. In Memorial Drive , her 2020 memoir, she told the story of her mother’s life and death. A study of her relationship with her mother, the book was also a study of her mother’s relationships, of the moments of domestic bliss and the harrowing ones of domestic violence—about race-making in America and how Black women become vulnerable to abuse. “If I was with my father, I measured the polite responses from white people, the way they addressed him as ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister.’ Whereas my mother would be called ‘Gal,’ never ‘Miss’ or ‘Ma’am,’ as I had been taught was proper.” The polarizing experiences of her parents were part of an accruement of observations about the linguistic practice of racial identity—how people are read or made.

In The House of Being , Trethewey revisits many of these early memories, but from a different angle: She is primarily interested in telling the story of her native region, the South. “The ‘Solid South,’” she writes, “was a society based on the myths of innate racial difference, a hierarchy based on notions of supremacy, the language used to articulate that thinking was rooted in the unique experience of white southerners.” As with her mother’s story, so, too, with the story of the South: It has haunted her ever since she was a young person pushing against the Confederate realities and fictions that persisted in the region—whether through Jim Crow laws or groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy or the monuments memorializing the glory of Southern Civil War generals.

The Nation Weekly

In The House of Being , Trethewey seeks to break through these myths and tell a different story about the South. “I am reminded again of the moment in Black Boy when Richard Wright declares he wants to be a writer,” she writes, “and what it means to have someone with a kind of dominion over you try to diminish you by telling you what you cannot do or be.” Like Wright, and much like Hurston before him, Trethewey wants to show what has been lost by telling only one story about the South, and what might be gained by telling another.

Trethewey does this in several bold and original ways. Literalizing her interest in her home region, she considers how the design of Southern homes was influenced by African and Afro-Caribbean architecture. Her grandmother’s shotgun house conveys a story not just about the period it was made in, but also a much longer history. “The long-house format,” she notes, “is a legacy of West African architecture, brought to America by both free and enslaved peoples who arrived in New Orleans from Haiti, after the Revolution in 1804.”

Trethewey also describes the darker side of the American South during the height of the civil rights movement. One of her first memories of “domestic terrorism” occurred at a young age, well before she congealed every incident that happened during the 1960s. After the African American church adjacent to her grandmother’s house led a voter registration drive in Gulfport, an unknown person (most likely white) burned a cross on the plot of land that bordered the church and her grandmother’s house. This racially coded act of hatred was frightening and had a clear message in terms of the violence it conveyed, but it was also ambiguous: It left Trethewey retroactively wondering whether it was motivated by the voter drive or by her interracial household. Such ghosts stalk The House of Being , rambling through its corridors and stairways. Memories, Trethewey reminds us, raise questions that do not always have answers. The South is a place that is simultaneously welcoming and inimical, a home to millions and yet also a hostile land.

The Surprising Origins and Politics of Equality The Surprising Origins and Politics of Equality

Books & the Arts / Samuel Moyn

The Intractable Puzzle of Growth The Intractable Puzzle of Growth

Books & the Arts / Benjamin Kunkel

Trump Sues the Justice Department for $100 Million Trump Sues the Justice Department for $100 Million

James D. Zirin

On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez On the Legacy of Hugo Chávez

Lived History / Greg Grandin

At times, I wondered if The House of Being needed a more cohesive narrative arc—a clear beginning, middle, and end. The text is often elliptical, circling back on memories and skipping ahead to new and unfamiliar territory. Often it invokes previous books and poems that Trethewey has written, as well as pasts that some of us may need to be more familiar with. This can be invigorating but also frustrating. Yet for Trethewey, the labyrinthine nature of the book is intended to match form with content: Her desire is not to offer a clean and linear narrative. Instead, she wants to tell a story about the South that is full of messiness and confusion. “Writing,” Trethewey notes near the end of the book, “is a way of creating order out of chaos, of taking charge of one’s own story, being the sovereign of the self by pushing back against received knowledge and guarding the sanctity of the dwelling place of the imagination.”

• Submit a correction
• Send a letter to the editor
• Reprints & permissions

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you, The Editors of The Nation

Edna Bonhomme

Edna Bonhomme, a historian of science and writer based in Berlin, Germany, is the author of the forthcoming A History of the World in Six Plagues . She is a contributing writer for Frieze magazine.

More from The Nation

Rachel Kushner’s Brilliant Avant-Garde Spy Thriller Rachel Kushner’s Brilliant Avant-Garde Spy Thriller

In Creation Lake, Kushner transforms the genre's familiar plot twists and turns into a study of the many fictions we tell one another.

Books & the Arts / Nicolás Medina Mora

Stay-at-Home Stay-at-Home

Poems / Matthew Buckley Smith

The Genius of Garth Greenwell The Genius of Garth Greenwell

Set abroad or at home, in unfamiliar worlds an ocean away or in an intensive care unit in Iowa, Greenwell's novels are songs of the self and of the United States as a whole.

Books & the Arts / Hannah Gold

Questlove’s Personal History of Hip-Hop Questlove’s Personal History of Hip-Hop

An elegiac retelling of rap's origins, Hip-Hop Is History also ends with a sense of hope.

Books & the Arts / Bijan Stephen

Danzy Senna’s Acerbic Satires of Art and Money Danzy Senna’s Acerbic Satires of Art and Money

Having gnawed away at literary and political conventions from within their hallowed forms, Senna has now set her eyes on Hollywood.

Books & the Arts / Lovia Gyarkye

The “Cascade of Errors” That Led to America’s War on Terror The “Cascade of Errors” That Led to America’s War on Terror

Steve Coll’s new book looks at the hubris and delusions of American foreign-policy makers and counterparts in the Middle East that led to a war that still haunts the globe.

Books & the Arts / Lyle Jeremy Rubin

Latest from the nation

Black women are the past, present, and future of the democratic party, the death toll in gaza reaches over 40,000, harris replaces biden, corporations, trump sues the justice department for $100 million, donald trump is still running against hillary clinton, editor's picks.

VIDEO: People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United States. Here’s Why.

Historical Amnesia About Slavery Is a Tool of White Supremacy

SUBMIT AN ESSAY FOR THE STEWART BELLMAN WRITING AWARDS

2024 Stewart Bellman Awards Submissions Due Friday, March 8  by 5:00 p.m.

• A student may submit up to three total essays and those must each be to different categories.
• The essays must have been submitted for a class from between March 1, 2023 , and March 1, 2024 .
• The three categories again this year are:
• Composition I and II Essays (of any type for those classes)
• Literature (Literary Analysis)
• General Academic Writing (any discipline and type of essay)

Uploaded essays must include a title, but all other identifying information (names, courses, running headers) must be removed.

• Students will make their submissions via the Bellman Awards page , easily reached via the BHSU main webpage, no later than Friday, March 8, 2024 , by 5:00 p.m. (MST) 
• Cash rewards and certificates are provided for the winners.
• Award ceremony and reception TBA.

If you have any questions, please contact Matthew Bauman. [email protected]

Bellman Award Form

• Program Information
• Gen Ed Courses
• Certificate
• Three Peaks Review
• Writing Resources
• English Faculty
• Bellman Awards

Contact Info

Matthew Bauman Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing [email protected] Phone: 605-642-1272 College of Liberal Arts, English Black Hills State University 1200 University St. Spearfish, SD, USA 57799

1200 University Street Spearfish, SD 57799-9502 Phone: 605.642.6131 Fax: 605.642.6254 [email protected]

4300 Cheyenne Blvd Box Elder, SD 57719-7700 Phone: 605.718.4112

• Future Students
• Pay For College
• Concern Form
• Registration & Records
• Student Portal
• Contact Form
• A-Z Site Index
• Campus Calendar
• Jacket Connect
• Campus Photos
• Transcript Request

Information

• Community Info
• Desire2Learn (D2L)
• Maps/Directions
• Official Social Channels
• Student Consumer Information

Questions? Privacy Title IX Terms of Use Email Login Email Password Reset

Copyright © 2024 · Black Hills State University

ENHANCING LITERATURE TEACHING THROUGH SUGGESTOPEDIA: A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH

11 Pages Posted: 26 Aug 2024

Andrew Leo Castrodes

Department of Education

Date Written: July 03, 2024

This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of suggestopedia in teaching literature to Grade 11 students at Zapatera National High School, Cebu City, during the 2022-2023 academic year. Using a quasi-experimental design with 60 students divided into control and experimental groups, the study compares pretest and posttest performances. The experimental group received instruction through suggestopedia, while the control group followed traditional lecture-based methods. Both groups showed improvement in posttest scores, but the experimental group achieved significantly higher results. These findings suggest that suggestopedia enhances literature instruction, making learning more enjoyable and meaningful, and fostering a deeper understanding of the material. This serves as the foundation for a proposed action plan to integrate suggestopedia into literature teaching practices.

Keywords: teaching literature, suggestion pedagogy, quasi-experimental, senior high school students

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Andrew Leo Castrodes (Contact Author)

Department of education ( email ).

Region VII Cebu City Division Cebu, Cebu 6000 Philippines 09294703653 (Phone)

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics, related ejournals, pedagogy ejournal.

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Teacher Education eJournal

Literary theory & criticism ejournal.

Subscribe to this free journal for more curated articles on this topic

Women, Gender & Literature eJournal

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Systematic Review
• Open access
• Published: 25 August 2024

Immediate and long-term efficacy of transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDS) in obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis

• Luxin Xie 1 , 2 ,
• Peina Hu 1 , 2 ,
• Zhenglong Guo 1 ,
• Miao Chen 1 ,
• Xiao Wang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2842-4975 1 , 3 ,
• Xinzhe Du 1 , 3 ,
• Yue Li 1 , 3 ,
• Bo Chen 4 ,
• Jihui Zhang 4 ,
• Wentao Zhao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8015-5851 1 , 3 &
• Sha Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6710-8126 1 , 3  

Translational Psychiatry volume  14 , Article number:  343 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

88 Accesses

1 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Psychiatric disorders

Currently, there is still debate over the effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety disorders (ADs). To investigate the immediate and long-term effectiveness of tDCS in these diseases, we conducted a systematic review and quantitative analysis of existing literature on the treatment of OCD, PTSD, and ADs with tDCS. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we searched seven electronic databases and systematically retrieved articles published from May 2012 to June 2024 that compared the effects of active tDCS with sham stimulation in the treatment of these disorders. We included primary outcome measures such as the change scores in disorder-specific and general anxiety symptoms before and after treatment, as well as secondary outcomes such as changes in disorder-specific and general anxiety symptoms at follow-up. We also assessed the impact of tDCS on depressive symptoms. Fifteen papers met the eligibility criteria. Overall, the results of meta-analysis indicated that tDCS had a high effect in improving specific symptoms (SMD = −0.73, 95% CI: −1.09 to −0.37) and general anxiety symptoms (SMD = −0.75; 95% CI: −1.23 to −0.26) in OCD, PTSD and ADs, with effects lasting up to 1 month and showing a moderate effect size. Furthermore, tDCS demonstrated immediate and significant alleviation of depressive symptoms in these diseases. This study concludes that tDCS can serve as a non-invasive brain stimulation technology for treating these disorders, and the therapeutic effects can be maintained for a period of time.

Similar content being viewed by others

Efficacy and safety of transcranial direct current stimulation as an add-on treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder: a randomized, sham-controlled trial

Non-invasive brain stimulation for posttraumatic stress disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Pre-clinical indications of brain stimulation treatments for non-affective psychiatric disorders, a status update

Introduction.

The lifetime prevalence of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety disorders (ADs) is approximately 21%, with an annual incidence of 14% [ 1 ]. These disorders share some basic clinical features, including excessive and persistent anxiety, attention bias towards threatening stimuli, hyperarousal and avoidance [ 2 ]. Therefore, the similar approaches would be applied composing drug treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and psychological intervention with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. However, the side effects of drug and issues such as the cost and commitment limitations of psychotherapy hinder adherence and affect treatment. About 30% of patients still cannot receive effective treatment [ 6 , 7 , 8 ]. New researches suggested non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), including repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), deep brain stimulation (DBS), and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) may be a new treatment for OCD, PTSD and Ads [ 9 ]. Among these NIBS techniques, tDCS is characterized by its relatively safe, well-tolerable, low cost and convenient combination with pharmacotherapy, making it more suitable for clinical promotion and application [ 10 ]. Therefore, it is crucial and practical to determine the effect of tDCS on OCD, PTSD and ADs.

tDCS is a tool to modulate synaptic connections and induce cortical functioning by supplying a mild direct current (usually 0.5MA–2MA) over the scalp [ 10 ]. The effect of tDCS is polarity-dependent: anodal stimulation increases cortical excitability by depolarizing neurons, and cathodal stimulation inhibits cerebral excitability by hyperpolarizing neurons [ 11 ]. Additionally, parameters of tDCS such as current intensity, duration and stimulation sessions also have a significant influence on the level of excitability [ 12 , 13 ]. However, the optimal protocol of tDCS is still being explored. Researches have shown that tDCS not only modulated cortical excitability by altering the resting membrane potential during stimulation but also modified synaptic activity to produce aftereffects [ 14 ]. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on both the immediate and long-term efficacy of tDCS.

NIBS, as a treatment technology, is based on physiology and pathological mechanism of the diseases. Increasing evidence to demonstrates that OCD is associate with hyperactivation of cortical-striatum-thalamus-cortical (CSTC) circuitry [ 15 , 16 ], and several components of the circuitry such as orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) have been tested as targets for OCD treatment using NIBS [ 17 , 18 ]. The brain regions involved in PTSD include the amygdal, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and mPFC, which are responsible for fear responses in humans [ 19 , 20 ]. Moreover, DLPFC, as a core component of central executive network (CEN), is correlated with cognitive control in PTSD [ 21 ]. Although ADs involve different subtypes, they are closely related to fear responses [ 22 ]. Thus, the most consistent physiological characteristic of ADs is the overactivation of the amygdala, similar to PTSD [ 23 , 24 ]. Neuroimaging studies have also highlighted the hypoactivity of the prefrontal cortex in anxiety patients, and emphasized that the hyperactivity amygdala might be caused by inadequate inhibitory control of the prefrontal cortex [ 25 , 26 ]. As a result, the anodal target for NIBS in anxiety disorders is primarily focused on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (L-DLPFC). Moreover, hypo- and hyperactivity in the left and right DLPFC is associated with emotional dysregulation and attention bias towards negative information in MDD [ 27 ]. tDCS may also be effective in alleviating symptoms of depression in these diseases. In summary, OCD, PTSD and ADs not only share fundamental clinical features but also involve similar neuropathological mechanisms, such as the amygdal and prefrontal cortex. Therefore, it is more valuable and meaningful to synthesize them in order to quantitatively analyze the effect of tDCS.

Previous meta-analysis studies amied to explore the efficacy of NIBS on specific symptoms of OCD [ 28 ], PTSD [ 29 ] and ADs [ 30 ] individually. Shu and colleagus inverstigated the efficacy of NIBS on OCD that included four tDCS studies. The authors concluded that tDCS was not superior to the sham stimulation in alleviating OCD symptoms [ 28 ]. Rebecca and colleagus did not quantitatively explore the effects of tDCS on posttraumatic core symptoms due to limitations in the number of studies. Their paper included two tDCS studies both of which suggested a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms compared to the sham tDCS [ 29 ]. Alessandra and colleagus conducted a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of NIBS in the treatment of anxiety disorders. Their study showed that NIBS can alleviate clinical symptoms in patients with anxiety disorders, but they didn’t analyse the potency of tDCS separately [ 30 ]. Overall, on the one hand, we discover the effect of tDCS has not received enough attention, and its long-term effects are seldom noticed. On the other hand, previous meta-analysis explored the effect of tDCS on OCD, PTSD, and ADs separately instead of integrating them.

In conclusion, our study aims to conduct a quantitative analysis of existing studies on tDCS for OCD, PTSD, and ADs. We will investigate the immediate and long-term efficacy of tDCS for specific symptoms and general anxiety symptoms in these diseases. Considering that the comorbidity of anxiety and depression is up to 30–67% [ 31 ], and existing meta-analyses have already indicated that tDCS can treat major depressive episodes [ 32 ]. We will also examine the effectiveness of tDCS for depression symptoms in OCD, PTSD, and ADs. Finally, we will test the association between tDCS stimulation parameters and effect sizes using meta-analysis regression.

The present review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) [ 33 ]. This meta-analysis was registered with the PROSPERO, with the registration number CRD42023418957 ( https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO ).

Search strategy

Four English databases including PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and the Cochrane Library, and three Chinese databases involving Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), WanFang and the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), were systematically searched articles related to the treatment of OCD, PTSD, and ADs with tDCS from May 2012 to June 5th 2024. In our search, we discovered that the first study on tDCS therapy for related disorders was published in May 2012 [ 34 ], prompting us to commence within this period. We adopted Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) or Entry Terms for “tDCS” along with relevant disorders (such as “obsessive compulsive disorder,” “posttraumatic stress disorder,” “generalized anxiety disorder,” “panic disorder,” “agoraphobia,” “specific phobia,” “social anxiety disorder”) (See Supplementary materials STable 1 ). Additionally, we manually searched the related meta-analyses of our study to identify other eligible studies.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Studies were included if they fulfilled the following criteria: (1) 18–70 years old; (2) clinical diagnosis of OCD, PTSD or ADs according to DSM, ICD or CCMD, and clarify the diagnostic types of anxiety disorders; (3) Unrestricted use of medication and psychological therapy; (4) randomized, sham-controlled trials using tDCS, with consistent target areas for active and sham tDCS; if the study is the randomized controlled crossover trial, the data from the first stage will be used; (5) At least one validated clinical scale as an outcome measure.

Studies were excluded if: (1) no clear criteria of clinical diagnosis; (2) Comorbid neurological diseases, current addiction, bipolar, psychotic, and neurocognitive disorders; (3) no sham tDCS as control or the target areas for active and sham tDCS were inconsistent; (4) duplicated data sets; (5) review, case-report, meta-analysis, and meeting abstracts. Furthermore, comorbid depression and anxiety disorders were not considered as criteria for exclusion.

Records screening and data extraction

Firstly, two researchers (XL, HP) independently conducted preliminary screening according to inclusion and exclusion criteria based on the research title and abstract. The records were categorized as “include,” “exclude” or “maybe”. Then, studies that could not be determined for inclusion underwent full-text reading and screening. Any conflicts during the title-abstract and full-text screening stages were resolved through discussion and reach consensus. If consensus could not be reached, the researchers would discuss with a third senior researcher. Finally, two researchers independently extracted and verified data form included literature. The following data were extracted: article indexing information, subject demographic information, tDCS treatment parameters, outcome measures, and pre- and post- treatment data, including follow-up data. If the data was unavailable in original publications, the corresponding author was contacted.

Study quality assessment

Two researchers (XL, HP) conducted independent assessments of the quality of the included studies using the Cochrane Collaboration’s Risk of Bias Tool (RoB2) [ 35 ]. This tool is structured into five bias domains, which include “the randomization process,” “intended interventions,” “missing outcome data,” “measurement of the outcome” and “selection of the reported result.” The overall risk of bias for a study depends on assessment of each individual domain. If all domains are judged to have a low risk of bias, the overall risk of bias is considered low and the study is considered to have high quality. Conversely, if at least one domain is judged to raise some concerns and not to be at high risk of bias for any domain, the overall risk of bias is considered to have some cencerns and the study is considered to have moderate quality. Furthermore, other merging estimation is considered to have a high risk. To determine the bias in the domain of “selection of the reported result,” researchers examined the registered protocol provided in the paper. Conflicts were resolved through consultation, and a third researcher was consulted if necessary.

Quantitative analysis

The data extracted from each study were quantitatively analyzed. The primary outcome measures were the change scores of pre-post treatment mean difference in disorder-specific symptoms scale and general anxiety symptoms scale. The secondary outcome measures included the change scores of before treatment to follow-up mean difference in disorder-specific symptoms scale and general anxiety symptoms scale, as well as the change scores of pre-post treatment mean difference in general depression symptoms scale. When there were two validated clinical questionnaires assessing the same outcome (e.g., anxiety symptoms: HAMA, BAI), the scale that was used more frequently in other studies was selected. The standard deviation of the change score was calculated as suggested by the Cochrane Handbook for systematic Reviews of Interventions [ 35 ], as follows:

where corr is the correlation between pre- and post-measurements variances, set at 0.5 as suggested by Follman and colleagues [ 36 ].

The analysis was performed using Stata 16.0. Using the “metan” package to calculate Hedges’g as the measure of effect size. This calculation helps correct bias due to small samples sizes [ 36 ]. Heterogeneity was assessed using Q-test and I 2 metric. Subgroup analysis by diseases was conducted to explore whether disease was the source of heterogeneity. Sensitivity analysis was performed using the “metaninf” package to test for heterogeneity caused by outliers in a study. Additionally, Egger’s regression and the funnel plot were used to analyze publication bias. Finally, meta-regression was employed to investigate the association between tDCS stimulation parameters (the number of sessions, current intensity, session duration, anode targets) and effect sizes. Among them, convert anode targets into dummy variables for regression analysis. According to the Cochrane Handbook’s recommendations, a funnel plot and meta-regression is conducted when there are at least 10 studies [ 35 ]. Due to the different features included in the studies (such as patient characteristics, stimulation parameters, scales, etc.) and the presence of varying effect sizes, the random effects model was chosen for all analyses. This model helps to account for the errors caused by sampling errors and real differences in effect sizes [ 37 , 38 ].

Study selection and characteristics

The literature search is presented in Fig. 1 . A total of 2094 records were retrieved from 7 databases, and 683 duplicate records were removed. Based on the inclusion criteria, full-text of 28 papers was retrieved, and 15 papers were ultimately included in the analysis. Among these, the study by Jafari et al. [ 39 ] and Jaber et al. [ 40 ] included subjects divided into three groups: both active tDCS groups with different current intensities (1MA, 2MA), and a sham tDCS group. For the analysis, these reports were considered as two independent studies. In addition, the report by Smits et al. [ 41 ] included two types of diseases (PTSD and ADs), Due to the lack of definitive diagnosis of ADs, we only extracted data on PTSD symptoms for analysis. The characteristics of the participants are described in Table 1 .

Flow chart of literature search.

The detailed results of the quality assessment are documented in Table 2 . Among these studies, 70.6% (12/17) of the studies were deemed to have a low risk of bias and high quality, while 23.5% (4/17) of the studies were considered to have a moderate quality. Only one study has a high risk of bias. To improve the quality of meta-analysis, the study with high-risk bias was excluded in the main text. The supplementary materials will provide the results of all studies (the result has not changed).

The main sources of bias in the studies were identified as “selection of the reported result” and “intended interventions.” In terms of selective reporting, certain studies [ 42 , 43 , 44 ] did not mention the registered protocol, making it impossible to determine if selective reporting occurred. Regarding intervention bias, studies categorized as having “some concerns” did not explicitly state whether the experimenter who applied the tDCS was aware of the purposes of the study. Moreover, the randomization design, as a secondary factor, had an impact on bias. Despite the random allocation of participants, studies conducted by Gowda [ 45 ] and Smits [ 41 ] et al. had a significant statistical difference in the sex radio between sham and tDCS group, which could potentially impact the study results.

tDCS stimulation parameters

The stimulation parameters are detailed in Table 3 . Firstly, regarding the placement of the target area, the anode was positioned on the L- DLPFC in 11 studies, while the cathode areas varied. Secondly, in terms of current intensity, it ranged from 1MA to 2MA, with 13 studies applying a current of 2MA. Moving on to stimulation sessions, 2 studies administered 5 sessions, while 10 studies included 10 sessions. Finally, with regards to session duration, 12 studies had a duration of 20 min, while the remaining studies had a duration of 30 min.

Analysis of the primary outcome

Disorder-specific symptoms.

A total of 15 studies fulfilled the eligibility criteria for the primary outcome with disorder-specific symptoms, including 643 participants (See supplementary materials STable 2 – 4 ). The results of meta-ananlysis showed that tDCS reduced the specific symptoms in OCD, PTSD, and ADs, with a high effect size (SMD = −0.73, 95% CI: −1.09 to −0.37; Z  = −3.960, p  < 0.001) and a high heterogeneity (I 2  = 77.8%, p  < 0.001) (Fig. 2A ).

A Immediate effect size of tDCS on disorder-specific symptoms. B Immediate effect size of tDCS on general anxiety symptoms. C Long-term effect size of tDCS on disorder-specific symptoms. D Long-term effect size of tDCS on general anxiety symptoms. CI confidence interval.

Subgroup analysis indicated that tDCS effectively improved the specific symptoms in SAD, GAD, and OCD (SMD SAD  = −2.27, 95% CI: −2.97 to −1.57, I 2  = 0%, p  > 0.05; SMD GAD  = −0.61, 95% CI: −1.03 to −0.19, I 2  = 0%, p  > 0.05; SMD OCD  = −0.55, 95% CI: −1.00 to −0.09, I 2  = 77.1%, p  < 0.001). Conversely, tDCS couldn’t alleviate specific symptoms of PD and PTSD (SMD PD  = 0.27, 95% CI: −0.45 to 0.99, I 2  = 0%, p  < 0.001; SMD PTSD  = −0.90, 95% CI: −1.82 to 0.03, I 2  = 73.0%, p  > 0.05).

Sensitivity test results showed that no outliers from any study influenced the overall results. Nevertheless, in terms of publication bias, the funnel plot indicated symmetry (Fig. 3A ) and Egger’s regression test suggested no significant statistical difference ( t  = −1.03, p  = 0.323).

A Immediate efficacy for disorder-specific symptoms. B Immediate efficacy for general anxiety symptoms. C Long-term efficacy for disorder-specific symptoms.

General anxiety symptoms

There were 10 studies involving 422 subjects that reported the general anxiety symptoms. The results of meta-analysis suggested that tDCS reduced the severity of general anxiety symptoms in OCD, PTSD and ADs, with a high effect size (SMD = −0.75; 95% CI: −1.23 to −0.26; Z  = −2.999, p  < 0.01). Q-statistics and I 2 indicated that the included studies had a high heterogeneity (I 2  = 80.7%, p  < 0.001) (Fig. 2B ).

The results of subgroup analysis indicated that tDCS alleviated general anxiety symptoms in SAD, PTSD and OCD (SMD SAD  = −2.29, 95% CI: −3.59 to −0.98, I 2  = 69.5%, p  > 0.05; SMD PTSD  = −0.80, 95% CI: −1.51 to −0.10, I 2  = 0%, p  < 0.001; SMD OCD  = −0.50, 95% CI: −0.98 to −0.01; I 2  = 73.4%, p  < 0.01). However, tDCS had no significant impact on general anxiety symptoms in PD (SMD = 0.24, 95% CI: −0.48 to 0.96, I 2  = 0%, p  < 0.001).

The results of the sensitivity analysis indicated that omitting any study, the results of the remaining studies were consistent with the original results. The funnel plot may indicate the presence of publication bias (Fig. 3B ), although Egger’s regression test did not show statistical significance ( t  = −0.67, p  = 0.522).

Analysis of the secondary outcome

Follow-up of disorder-specific symptoms.

A total of 13 studies reported the follow-up results. Among these, only one study recorded data for one-week follow-up [ 46 ], while the follow-up periods in other studies were longer or close to one month, our study focuses on the long-term effects of tDCS, so the study with a one-week follow-up was excluded. The meta-analysis of the remaining 12 studies, which involving 460 subjects, showed that tDCS had a long-term effect on disorder-specific symptoms in OCD, PTSD, and ADs, with a moderate effect size (SMD = −0.60; 95% CI: −1.04 to −0.16; Z  = −2.650, p  < 0.01) and a high heterogeneity (I 2  = 79.7%, p  < 0.001) (Fig. 2C ).

Subgroup analysis showed that tDCS provide a long-term effect in alleviating the specific symptoms in SAD and OCD (SMD SAD  = −2.20, 95% CI: −2.95 to −1.46, I 2  = 0.0%, p  > 0.05; SMD OCD  = −0.39, 95% CI: −0.68 to −0.09, I 2  = 22.3%, p  > 0.05). However, tDCS did not provide a long-term effect in alleviating the specific symptoms in PTSD (SMD = −0.45, 95% CI: −1.49 to 0.60, I 2  = 87.9%, p  < 0.001).

The results of the sensitivity analysis indicated that omitting any study, the results of the remaining studies were consistent with the original results. Meanwhile, the funnel plot (Fig. 3C ) and Egger’s regression test ( t  = −3.19, p  < 0.05) indicated significant publication bias.

Follow-up of general anxiety symptoms

Follow-up results of general anxiety symptoms were recorded in 7 studies. The meta-analysis of the results suggested that tDCS does not provide a long-term effect in reducing the severity of general anxiety symptoms in OCD, PTSD, and ADs (SMD = −0.30; 95% CI: −0.68 to 0.09; Z  = −1.523, p  > 0.05), with a high heterogeneity (I 2  = 53.3%, p  < 0.05).

The results of sensitivity analysis showed the study of Aksu et al. [ 47 ] had a strong heterogeneity. After excluding this study, the results suggested that tDCS has a long-term effectiveness in reducing the severity of general anxiety symptoms in OCD, PTSD, and ADs (SMD = −0.41; 95% CI: −0.78 to −0.03; Z  = −2.140, p  < 0.05), with a moderate heterogeneity (I 2  = 43.4%, p  = 0.116) (Fig. 2D ). Subgroup analysis showed that tDCS provided a long-term effect in alleviating the general anxiety symptoms in PTSD (SMD = −0.98, 95% CI: −1.70 to −0.26, I 2  = 0%, p  < 0.001) and has no long-term effect in alleviating the general anxiety symptoms in OCD (SMD = −0.28, 95% CI: −0.63 to 0.07, I 2  = 26.5%, p  > 0.05). Due to the limited number of studies, only Egger’s regression test was conducted, and the results indicated no significant publication bias ( t  = −1.10, p  > 0.05).

General depression symptoms

A total of 9 studies involving 310 subjects have reported the results of general depression scales. The meta-analysis of results revealed that tDCS effectively improved the general depression symptoms in OCD, PTSD, and ADs (SMD = −0.70, 95% CI: −1.09 to −0.31; Z  = −3.487, p  < 0.001), with a high heterogeneity (I 2  = 62.1%, p  < 0.01). Subgroup analysis showed that tDCS could improve the general depression symptoms in SAD, PTSD, OCD (SMD SAD  = −1.07, 95% CI: −2.06 to −0.09; I 2  = 65.2%, p  > 0.05; SMD PTSD  = −1.14, 95% CI: −1.88 to −0.41, I 2  = 0%, p  < 0.001; SMD OCD  = −0.62, 95% CI: −1.13 to −0.12, I 2  = 60.6%, p  > 0.05), while it did not significantly reduce the severity of general depression symptoms in PD (SMD = 0.05, 95% CI: −0.66 to 0.77, I 2  = 0%, p  < 0.001).

Sensitivity test results showed that no outliers from any study influenced the overall results. The Egger’s regression test ( t  = −2.85, p  < 0.05) indicated the presence of some publication bias.

Meta-regression analysis

Meta-regression analysis was conducted on outcome measures that included at least 10 studies. The results showed that tDCS stimulation parameters such as the number of sessions, current intensity, session duration, and target location of the anode did not explain the heterogeneity. Statistical characteristics for each covariate are recorded in Table 4 .

The meta-analysis aimed to investigate the impact of tDCS in reducing disorder-specific symptoms, general anxiety, and depression symptoms for patients with OCD, PTSD and ADs. This study also explored the effects of different tDCS parameters on effectiveness. The results indicated that tDCS could immediately improve the clinical symptoms of OCD, PTSD, and ADs, with a high effect size. It is worth noting that the effect of tDCS on disease-specific and general anxiety symptoms can be maintained for up to one month, with a moderate effect size. Moreover, the tDCS parameters, including the number of sesssions, current intensity, session duration and target location of the anode did not have a significant influence on efficacy.

Immediate effects of tDCS on clinical symptoms of diseases

Based on the immediate therapeutic effects of tDCS on specific symptoms, general anxiety symptoms, and general depression symptoms of PTSD, OCD and ADs, we found that the effects of tDCS on different diseases varies.

First, only one randomized sham-controlled study about PD [ 47 ], Contrary to the researchers’ hypotheses, the results indicates that tDCS does not improve clinical outcomes. The researchers believe this may be due to the high placebo response in randomized controlled trials of anxiety disorders. Additionally, the clinical severity of PD included in the study is relatively low, which can lead to a higher placebo response and influence the results [ 47 ].

Secondly, our results suggest that tDCS has the potential to improve clinical symptoms of GAD and SAD with moderate and high effect sizes, respectively, which is consistent with the latest review of treatments for anxiety disorders [ 48 ]. Our study includes 2 studies on tDCS for GAD and 2 studies on tDCS for SAD, all with the anode placed at the L-DLPFC, further supporting that the L-DLPFC is an effective target for tDCS treatment of ADs. On the one hand, the excitatory stimulation of the L-DLPFC may upregulate the positive response to positive emotional stimuli and downregulate the negative response to emotional stimuli, enhancing emotional regulation ability [ 49 ]; On the other hand, tDCS may increase the functional connectivity between the DLPFC and limbic network, including the amygdala, thereby improving attention control and reducing hypersensitivity of the amygdala to threat stimuli [ 25 , 50 ]. These processes are related to the core symptoms of anxiety disorders (fear, avoidance). In fact, neuroimaging studies have shown a negative correlation between DLPFC activity and anxiety [ 51 ].

Thirdly, our meta-analysis included three studies on tDCS treatment for PTSD, and the results suggested that tDCS did not improve specific symptoms of PTSD [ 41 , 52 , 53 ]. We cannot conclude the efficacy of tDCS on general anxiety and depressive symptoms in PTSD due to limited studies. The three studies showed variations in the severity of the PTSD, tDCS treatment protocols, and treatment outcomes. Therefore, we believe that the efficacy of tDCS may differ across various severities of PTSD. In addition, the target area, number of sessions, and interval between tDCS treatments may also influence effectiveness. Future research should continue to expand on existing studies to clarify the efficacy of tDCS for PTSD.

Long-term effects of tDCS on clinical symptoms of diseases

It is worth noting that as a novel result of this meta-analysis, we discovered that tDCS can improve specific symptoms and general anxiety symptoms of PTSD, OCD, and ADs for up to one month.

We believe that periodic tDCS may induce the late LTP-like plasticity. Long term potentiation (LTP), involves to the enduring functional enhancement of synaptic connections, or structural modification of neuronal connections [ 54 ]. It is divided into Early LTP (E-LTP) and Late LTP (L-LTP) depending on whether excitability alterations last for more than 3 h [ 55 ]. when the periodic tDCS protocols induce neuroplastic changes lasting for several days or weeks, this is referred to as L-LTP. L-LTP may be a candidate mechanism for long-term memory formation [ 56 ]. E-LTP relies on the activation of calcium-dependent kinases [ 57 ]. L-LTP requires gene expression and protein synthesis to achieve changes in synaptic strength, and also involves modifications to the activity of AMPA and NMDA receptors [ 58 , 59 ].

Late LTP-Like plasticity might be the mechanism through which tDCS produces long-term effects. Additionally, studies have shown that the interval between tDCS sessions plays a crucial role in L-LTP [ 59 ], and future studies should consider controlling this variable to investigate the optimal treatment regimen with tDCS.

When interpreting the research findings, it is important to consider the limitations of this study comprehensively. Firstly, due to differences in demographic data, assessment tools, and tDCS treatment parameters, most of the results showed quite heterogeneity. While we attempted to use a random effect model and performed meta-regression, it is crucial to acknowledge this as a significant limitation of our findings. However, it should also be noted that I 2 may be overestimated in a small meta-analyses [ 60 ]. Secondly, the well-known high placebo response in tDCS must be taken into account [ 61 ], highlighting the importance of a blind procedure in study design. Unfortunately, due to the limitation of the number of studies, we were unable to strictly control this variable in our study. Thirdly, the number of randomized controlled studies on tDCS for OCD, PTSD, and ADs is limited, so we are unable to control for comorbidities or other interventions. In the future, further research should be conducted to investigate the immediate and long-term efficacy of tDCS in these disorders, in order to provide additional evidence to clarify of the efficacy of tDCS and elucidate the underlying pathological mechanisms of these diseases.

tDCS improves the clinical symptoms of OCD, PTSD and ADs immediately, and the efficacy can last for 1 month. tDCS can serve as a non-invasive brain stimulation technology for treating these disorders, and the therapeutic effects can be maintained for a period of time.

Baldwin DS, Anderson IM, Nutt DJ, Allgulander C, Bandelow B, den Boer JA, et al. Evidence-based pharmacological treatment of anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder: a revision of the 2005 guidelines from the British Association for Psychopharmacology[J]. J Psychopharmacol. 2014;28:403–39.

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Van’t Wout M, Longo SM, Reddy MK, Philip NS, Bowker MT, Greenberg BD. Transcranial direct current stimulation may modulate extinction memory in posttraumatic stress disorder[J]. Brain Behav. 2017;7:e00681.

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Bandelow B. Current and novel psychopharmacological drugs for anxiety disorders[J]. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1191:347–65.

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Apolinário-Hagen J, Drüge M, Fritsche L. Cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and acceptance commitment therapy for anxiety disorders: integrating traditional with digital treatment approaches[J]. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1191:291–329.

Thomsen PH. Obsessive-compulsive disorder: pharmacological treatment[J]. Eur Child Adolescent Psychiatry. 2000;9:S76–S84.

Article   Google Scholar  

Montavon F, Vandenberghe F, Eap CB. Use of pharmacological treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: analysis of a psychiatric population in Switzerland and comparison with international guidelines[J]. Encephale. 2022;49:446–52.

Atmaca Murad. Treatment-refractory obsessive compulsive disorder[J]. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry. 2016;70:127–33.

Bystritsky A. Treatment-resistant anxiety disorders[J]. Molecular Psychiatry. 2006;11:805–14.

Freire RC, Cabrera-Abreu C, Milev R. Neurostimulation in anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder[J]. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1191:331–46.

Zhao H, Qiao L, Fan D, Zhang S, Turel O, Li Y, et al. Modulation of brain activity with noninvasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): clinical applications and safety concerns[J]. Front Psychol. 2017;8:685.

Nitsche MA, Paulus W. Excitability changes induced in the human motor cortex by weak transcranial direct current stimulation[J]. J Physiol. 2000;527:633–9.

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Dedoncker J, Brunoni AR, Baeken C, Vanderhasselt MA. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in healthy and neuropsychiatric samples: influence of stimulation parameters[J]. Brain Stimul. 2016;9:501–17.

Salehinejad MA, Ghanavati E. Complexity of cathodal tDCS: relevance of stimulation repetition, interval, and intensity[J]. J Physiol. 2020;598:1127–9.

Stagg CJ, Nitsche MA. Physiological basis of transcranial direct current stimulation[J]. Neuroscientist. 2011;17:37–53.

Milad MR, Rauch SL. Obsessive-compulsive disorder: beyond segregated cortico-striatal pathways[J]. Trends Cogn Sci. 2012;16:43–51.

Van den Heuvel OA, Guido VW, Carles SM, Pino A, Samuel RC, Takashi N, et al. Brain circuitry of compulsivity[J]. Eur Neuropsychopharm. 2016;26:810–27.

Brunelin J, Mondino M, Bation R, Palm U, Saoud M, Poulet E. Transcranial direct current stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder: a systematic review[J]. Brain Sci. 2018;8:37.

Trevizol AP, Shiozawa P, Cook IA, Sato IA, Kaku CB, Guimarães FB, et al. Transcranial magnetic stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis[J]. J ECT. 2016;32:262–6.

Philip NS, Barredo J, van ‘t Wout-Frank M, Tyrka AR, Price LH, Carpenter LL. Network mechanisms of clinical response to transcranial magnetic stimulation in posttraumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder[J]. Biol Psychiatry. 2018;83:263–72.

Quirk GJ, Garcia R, González-Lima F. Prefrontal mechanisms in extinction of conditioned fear[J]. Biol Psychiatry. 2006;60:337–43.

Aupperle RL, Allard CB, Grimes EM, Simmons AN, Flagan T, Behrooznia M, et al. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation during emotional anticipation and neuropsychological performance in posttraumatic stress disorder[J]. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2012;69:360–71.

Lai CH. Task MRI-based functional brain network of anxiety[J]. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1191:3–20.

Taylor JM, Whalen PJ. Neuroimaging and anxiety: the neural substrates of pathological and non-pathological anxiety[J]. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2015;17:49.

Dresler T, Guhn A, Tupak SV, Ehlis AC, Herrmann MJ, Fallgatter AJ, et al. Revise the revised? New dimensions of the neuroanatomical hypothesis of panic disorder[J]. J Neural Transm. 2013;120:3–29.

Ironside M, Browning M, Ansari TL, Harvey CJ, Sekyi-Djan MN, Bishop SJ, et al. Effect of prefrontal cortex stimulation on regulation of amygdala response to threat in individuals with trait anxiety: a randomized clinical trial[J]. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76:71–78.

Cha J, DeDora D, Nedic S, Ide J, Greenberg T, Hajcak G, et al. Clinically anxious individuals show disrupted feedback between inferior frontal gyrus and prefrontal-limbic control circuit[J]. J Neurosci. 2016;36:4708–18.

Grimm S, Beck J, Schuepbach D, Hell D, Boesiger P, Bermpohl F, et al. Imbalance between left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in major depression is linked to negative emotional judgment: an fMRI study in severe major depressive disorder[J]. Biol Psychiatry. 2008;63:369–76.

Zhou S, Fang Y. Efficacy of non-invasive brain stimulation for refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials[J]. Brain Sci. 2022;12:943.

Kan RLD, Zhang BBB, Zhang JJQ, Kranz GS. Non-invasive brain stimulation for posttraumatic stress disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis[J]. Transl Psychiatry. 2020;10:168.

Vergallito A, Gallucci A, Pisoni A, Punzi M, Caselli G, Ruggiero GM, et al. Effectiveness of noninvasive brain stimulation in the treatment of anxiety disorders: a meta-analysis of sham or behaviour-controlled studies[J]. J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2021;46:E592–E614.

Choi KW, Kim YK, Jeon HJ. Comorbid anxiety and depression: clinical and conceptual consideration and transdiagnostic treatment[J]. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1191:219–35.

Zhang R, Lam CLM, Peng X, Zhang D, Zhang C, Huang R, et al. Efficacy and acceptability of transcranial direct current stimulation for treating depression: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials[J]. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2021;126:481–90.

Page MJ, McKenzie JE, Bossuyt PM, Boutron I, Hoffmann TC, Mulrow CD, et al. The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews[J]. BMJ. 2021;372:n71.

Volpato C, Piccione F, Cavinato M, Duzzi D, Schiff S, Foscolo L, et al. Modulation of affective symptoms and resting state activity by brain stimulation in a treatment-resistant case of obsessive-compulsive disorder[J]. Neurocase. 2013;19:360–70.

Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 6.3 (updated February 2022). [Z]//TJ Higgins Jpt, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page Mj, Welch Va Available from www.training.cochrane.org/handbook . 2022.

Hedges LV. Distribution theory for glass’s estimator of effect size and related estimators[J]. J Educ Stat. 1981;6:107–28.

Bender R, Friede T, Koch A, Kuss O, Schlattmann P, Schwarzer G, et al. Methods for evidence synthesis in the case of very few studies[J]. Res Synth Methods. 2018;9:382–92.

Nikolakopoulou A, Mavridis D, Salanti G. Demystifying fixed and random effects meta-analysis[J]. Evid Based Ment Health. 2014;17:53–57.

Jafari E, Alizadehgoradel J, Pourmohseni Koluri F, Nikoozadehkordmirza E, Refahi M, Taherifard M, et al. Intensified electrical stimulation targeting lateral and medial prefrontal cortices for the treatment of social anxiety disorder: a randomized, double-blind, parallel-group, dose-comparison study[J]. Brain Stimul. 2021;14:974–86.

Alizadehgoradel J, Molaei B, Barzegar Jalali K, Pouresmali A, Sharifi K, Hallajian AH, et al. Targeting the prefrontal-supplementary motor network in obsessive-compulsive disorder with intensified electrical stimulation in two dosages: a randomized, controlled trial[J]. Transl Psychiatry. 2024;14:78.

Smits FM, Geuze E, Schutter D, Honk JV, Gladwin TE. Effects of tDCS during inhibitory control training on performance and PTSD, aggression and anxiety symptoms: a randomized-controlled trial in a military sample[J]. Psychol Med. 2021;52:1–11.

PubMed   Google Scholar  

Liu J, Xiang F, Huang Q, Zhu C. The efficacy of transcranial direct current stimulation in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder (in chinese)[J]. Zhejiang Clinical. Medical J. 2022;24:690–2.

Google Scholar  

Zhou P, Cai M, Yuan P, Yang S, Xi M. Effects of fluvoxamine combined with transcranial direct current stimulation on cognitive function, anxiety symptoms, serum BDNF and 5-HT levels in patients with first-episode obessive-complusive disorder (in chinese)[J]. Shaanxi Med J. 2022;51:990–4.

Movahed FS, Goradel JA, Pouresmali A, Mowlaie M. Effectiveness of transcranial direct current stimulation on worry, anxiety, and depression in generalized anxiety disorder: a randomized, single-blind pharmacotherapy and sham-controlled clinical trial[J]. IJ Psychiatry Behav Sci. 2018;12:e11071.

Gowda SM, Narayanaswamy JC, Hazari N, Bose A, Chhabra H, Balachander S, et al. Efficacy of pre-supplementary motor area transcranial direct current stimulation for treatment resistant obsessive compulsive disorder: a randomized, double blinded, sham controlled trial[J]. Brain Stimul. 2019;12:922–9.

de Lima AL, Braga FMA, da Costa RMM, Gomes EP, Brunoni AR, Pegado R. Transcranial direct current stimulation for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder: a randomized clinical trial[J]. J Affect Disord. 2019;259:31–37.

Aksu S, Soyata AZ, Mursalova Z, Eskicioğlu G, Tükel R. Transcranial direct current stimulation does not improve clinical and neurophysiological outcomes in panic disorder: a randomized sham-controlled trial[J]. Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2022;76:384–92.

Lee HJ, Stein MB. Update on treatments for anxiety-related disorders[J]. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2023;36:140–5.

Vicario CM, Salehinejad MA, Felmingham K, Martino G, Nitsche MA. A systematic review on the therapeutic effectiveness of non-invasive brain stimulation for the treatment of anxiety disorders[J]. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2019;96:219–31.

Todder D, Gershi A, Perry Z, Kaplan Z, Levine J, Avirame K. Immediate effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on obsession-induced anxiety in refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder: a pilot study[J]. J ECT. 2018;34:e51–7.

Bishop S, Duncan J, Brett M, Lawrence AD. Prefrontal cortical function and anxiety: controlling attention to threat-related stimuli[J]. Nat Neurosci. 2004;7:184–8.

Ahmadizadeh MJ, Rezaei M, Fitzgerald PB. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): a randomized, double-blinded, controlled trial[J]. Brain Res Bull. 2019;153:273–8.

Eyraud N, Poupin P, Legrand M, Caille A, Sauvaget A, Bulteau S, et al. Combining trauma script exposure with tDCS to alleviate symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder: a two-arm randomized sham-controlled multicenter trial[J]. Brain Stimul. 2024;17:591–3.

Feldman DE. Synaptic mechanisms for plasticity in neocortex[J]. Annu Rev Neurosci. 2009;32:33–55.

Reymann KG, Frey JU. The late maintenance of hippocampal LTP: requirements, phases, ‘synaptic tagging’, ‘late-associativity’ and implications[J]. Neuropharmacology. 2007;52:24–40.

Costa-Mattioli M, Sossin WS, Klann E, Sonenberg N. Translational control of long-lasting synaptic plasticity and memory[J]. Neuron. 2009;61:10–26.

Malenka RC, Bear MF. LTP and LTD: an embarrassment of riches[J]. Neuron. 2004;44:5–21.

Dozmorov M, Li R, Abbas AK, Hellberg F, Farre C, Huang FS, et al. Contribution of AMPA and NMDA receptors to early and late phases of LTP in hippocampal slices[J]. Neurosci Res. 2006;55:182–8.

Monte-Silva K, Kuo MF, Hessenthaler S, Fresnoza S, Liebetanz D, Paulus W, et al. Induction of late LTP-like plasticity in the human motor cortex by repeated non-invasive brain stimulation[J]. Brain Stimul. 2013;6:424–32.

von Hippel PT. The heterogeneity statistic I(2) can be biased in small meta-analyses[J]. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2015;15:35.

De Smet S, Nikolin S, Moffa A, Suen P, Vanderhasselt MA, Brunoni AR, et al. Determinants of sham response in tDCS depression trials: a systematic review and meta-analysis[J]. Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2021;109:110261.

Silva R, Brunoni AR, Goerigk S, Batistuzzo MC, Costa DLDC, Diniz JB, et al. Efficacy and safety of transcranial direct current stimulation as an add-on treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder: a randomized, sham-controlled trial[J]. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2021;46:1028–34.

Bation R, Mondino M, Le Camus F, Saoud M, Brunelin J. Transcranial direct current stimulation in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder: a randomized controlled trial[J]. Eur Psychiatry. 2019;62:38–44.

Yoosefee S, Amanat M, Salehi M, Mousavi SV, Behzadmanesh J, Safary V, et al. The safety and efficacy of transcranial direct current stimulation as add-on therapy to fluoxetine in obsessive-compulsive disorder: a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, clinical trial[J]. BMC Psychiatry. 2020;20:570.

Harika-Germaneau G, Heit D, Drapier D, Sauvaget A, Bation R, Chatard A, et al. Treating refractory obsessive compulsive disorder with cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the supplementary motor area: a large multisite randomized sham-controlled double-blind study[J]. Front Psychiatry. 2024;15:1338594.

Download references

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82271546, 82101625); National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFC2506201); Fund Program for the Scientific Activities of Selected Returned Overseas Professionals in Shanxi Province (20240041); Special fund for Science and Technology Innovation Teams of Shanxi Province (202304051001049).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Psychiatry, The First Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China

Luxin Xie, Peina Hu, Zhenglong Guo, Miao Chen, Xiao Wang, Xinzhe Du, Yue Li, Wentao Zhao & Sha Liu

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shanxi Medical University, Jinzhong, China

Luxin Xie & Peina Hu

Shanxi Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Assisted Diagnosis and Treatment for Mental Disorder, First Hospital of Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China

Xiao Wang, Xinzhe Du, Yue Li, Wentao Zhao & Sha Liu

Department of Mental Health, Sinopharm North Hospital, Baotou, China

Bo Chen & Jihui Zhang

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

LXX: conceptualization, methodology, software, writing—original draft. PNH: methodology, software, writing—original draft. ZLG: methodology, supervision. MC: methodology, software, validation. XW: methodology, software. XZD: software, supervision, validation. YL: methodology, visualization. BC: visualization, review & editing. JHZ: visualization, review & editing. WTZ: conceptualization, writing—review & editing. SL: conceptualization, writing—review & editing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wentao Zhao or Sha Liu .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary prism-checklist, supplementary materials, sfigure 1: forest plots of the effect size of tdcs on disorder-specific symptoms (a and b)., sfigure 2: funnel plots for disorder-specific symptoms (a and b)., stable 1: specific query in different databases., stable 2: the raw data of specific-disorder sympotoms., stable 3: the raw data of general anxiety sympotoms., stable 4: the raw data of general anxiety sympotoms., rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Xie, L., Hu, P., Guo, Z. et al. Immediate and long-term efficacy of transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDS) in obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Transl Psychiatry 14 , 343 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-024-03053-0

Download citation

Received : 10 August 2023

Revised : 14 August 2024

Accepted : 16 August 2024

Published : 25 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-024-03053-0

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Blog The Education Hub

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/08/20/gcse-results-day-2024-number-grading-system/

GCSE results day 2024: Everything you need to know including the number grading system

Thousands of students across the country will soon be finding out their GCSE results and thinking about the next steps in their education.   

Here we explain everything you need to know about the big day, from when results day is, to the current 9-1 grading scale, to what your options are if your results aren’t what you’re expecting.  

When is GCSE results day 2024?  

GCSE results day will be taking place on Thursday the 22 August.     

The results will be made available to schools on Wednesday and available to pick up from your school by 8am on Thursday morning.  

Schools will issue their own instructions on how and when to collect your results.   

When did we change to a number grading scale?  

The shift to the numerical grading system was introduced in England in 2017 firstly in English language, English literature, and maths.  

By 2020 all subjects were shifted to number grades. This means anyone with GCSE results from 2017-2020 will have a combination of both letters and numbers.  

The numerical grading system was to signal more challenging GCSEs and to better differentiate between students’ abilities - particularly at higher grades between the A *-C grades. There only used to be 4 grades between A* and C, now with the numerical grading scale there are 6.  

What do the number grades mean?  

The grades are ranked from 1, the lowest, to 9, the highest.  

The grades don’t exactly translate, but the two grading scales meet at three points as illustrated below.  

The bottom of grade 7 is aligned with the bottom of grade A, while the bottom of grade 4 is aligned to the bottom of grade C.    

Meanwhile, the bottom of grade 1 is aligned to the bottom of grade G.  

What to do if your results weren’t what you were expecting?  

If your results weren’t what you were expecting, firstly don’t panic. You have options.  

First things first, speak to your school or college – they could be flexible on entry requirements if you’ve just missed your grades.   

They’ll also be able to give you the best tailored advice on whether re-sitting while studying for your next qualifications is a possibility.   

If you’re really unhappy with your results you can enter to resit all GCSE subjects in summer 2025. You can also take autumn exams in GCSE English language and maths.  

Speak to your sixth form or college to decide when it’s the best time for you to resit a GCSE exam.  

Look for other courses with different grade requirements     

Entry requirements vary depending on the college and course. Ask your school for advice, and call your college or another one in your area to see if there’s a space on a course you’re interested in.    

Consider an apprenticeship    

Apprenticeships combine a practical training job with study too. They’re open to you if you’re 16 or over, living in England, and not in full time education.  

As an apprentice you’ll be a paid employee, have the opportunity to work alongside experienced staff, gain job-specific skills, and get time set aside for training and study related to your role.   

You can find out more about how to apply here .  

Talk to a National Careers Service (NCS) adviser    

The National Career Service is a free resource that can help you with your career planning. Give them a call to discuss potential routes into higher education, further education, or the workplace.   

Whatever your results, if you want to find out more about all your education and training options, as well as get practical advice about your exam results, visit the  National Careers Service page  and Skills for Careers to explore your study and work choices.   

You may also be interested in:

• Results day 2024: What's next after picking up your A level, T level and VTQ results?
• When is results day 2024? GCSEs, A levels, T Levels and VTQs

Tags: GCSE grade equivalent , gcse number grades , GCSE results , gcse results day 2024 , gsce grades old and new , new gcse grades

Sharing and comments

Share this page, related content and links, about the education hub.

The Education Hub is a site for parents, pupils, education professionals and the media that captures all you need to know about the education system. You’ll find accessible, straightforward information on popular topics, Q&As, interviews, case studies, and more.

Please note that for media enquiries, journalists should call our central Newsdesk on 020 7783 8300. This media-only line operates from Monday to Friday, 8am to 7pm. Outside of these hours the number will divert to the duty media officer.

Members of the public should call our general enquiries line on 0370 000 2288.

Sign up and manage updates

Follow us on social media, search by date.

Comments and moderation policy

IEEE Account

• Change Username/Password
• Update Address

Purchase Details

• Payment Options
• Order History
• View Purchased Documents

Profile Information

• Communications Preferences
• Profession and Education
• Technical Interests
• US & Canada: +1 800 678 4333
• Worldwide: +1 732 981 0060
• Contact & Support
• About IEEE Xplore
• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Nondiscrimination Policy
• Privacy & Opting Out of Cookies

A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. © Copyright 2024 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.

This paper is in the following e-collection/theme issue:

Published on 26.8.2024 in Vol 26 (2024)

This is a member publication of University College London (Jisc)

Sex-Based Performance Disparities in Machine Learning Algorithms for Cardiac Disease Prediction: Exploratory Study

Authors of this article: