The most common note I give on a literature review draft is the same one, over and over: this reads like a list. Source, summary. Source, summary. Forty pages of careful reading with no throughline connecting any of it.
The bibliography-with-commentary trap
It's an easy trap to fall into, because organizing by source feels thorough — you're demonstrating you read everything. But a reader finishing a source-by-source lit review usually can't tell you, in one sentence, what you think about the field. And that's the actual job of the chapter.
A lit review is an argument about a field
Your literature review should make a claim, not just a summary — something like: most work in this area has focused on X, has largely ignored Y, and that gap is exactly where your study sits. Everything else in the chapter should serve that claim.
A literature review without a claim is a bibliography with better formatting.
Finding your organizing claim
Ask yourself: if I had to argue one sentence about the state of this field, what would it be? Write that sentence before you touch the chapter again. Every section should exist because it supports, complicates, or sets up that sentence — not because a source exists.
A quick structural fix
Reorganize by theme or tension instead of by source. Group studies that agree, studies that conflict, and studies that leave a specific gap open. That structure does the argumentative work almost automatically — and it's usually a reorganization, not a rewrite, which makes it less daunting than it sounds.