During Week 7, I fell into a dangerous trap: passive reading. I found myself simply summarizing the authors’ words and accepting their theories without question. I quickly recognised that this is a fatal flaw in British postgraduate education, which heavily penalises descriptive writing and demands deep critical reflection.
To overcome this, I forced myself to shift from passive comprehension to active interrogation. While reading traditional texts like Joseph Mascelli’s (1998) The Five C’s of Cinematography, I aggressively scribbled questions in the margins: How does this live-action rule survive when physics do not exist? What are the limitations of this 20th-century model in a modern digital workspace? I stopped treating the literature as absolute truth and started treating it as an open academic debate. This mental shift allowed me to look for weaknesses and assumptions in the texts, which is exactly what makes a literature review truly critical.
