It happens to us so many times when we intently get engaged in discussions with somebody, we forget important words; how much ever we try to recall those words it becomes difficult for the mind and brain to recall them. If you cannot recall the precise words for something, you are facing the problem called ‘lethologica’ which may lead you to awkwardness sometimes.

Especially when addressing a conflict with somebody, such as a colleague, a boss, or somebody important the words matter. Sometimes, despite of how good your intentions are, if you use some wrong words, it can further upset the person and just make the issue worse. Other times you might say the exact thing that helps the person go from seemingly mad to cool as a cucumber.

When we forget the right words during discussions, the flow of conversation gets hampered.  And, listeners also get irritated. There are many other theories that attempt to explain the phenomenon lethologica. One more interesting thing about it is that when you are in a group of friends, the probability of everyone forgetting the world increases. When you seek help from others to recall the blocking word the discussion may go haywire. Most of the times, topic gets diverted. This is a common occurrence for most of the teachers/professors. While talking to the class, suddenly they forget the right term, the right expression, or the right phrase and the class is disturbed. The chances are, after the session these genius people remember the word. Sometimes people remember the word after a month or a week.

In psychology this phenomenon is known as “presque vu” or informally “tip of the tongue”. According to which when we make a query to get back some word from our memory, it often happens that the brain obtains a related word which is not the one we really asked for and is incorrect. Now this word then blocks the recovery of the correct word and that is why since this word is generally closely related to the word we want, we usually tell the first letter or some other characteristic. These blocking words are the phonological neighbors of the target word. This is quite common and for God’s sake don’t blame your memory for that. It’s just the way our brain works.

Do you know human memory has 3 parts: learn, store and recall. You need to see which part is faltering. When we don’t get the right word there could be a number of reasons. You could either be stressed which disturbs the recall mechanism. Or you get distracted by something more important, or you could also be multi tasking – thinking of many things at a time.  Human brain can think of one thing at a time. That’s about it. Multi tasking contributes to mind wandering. Age can also hamper brain’s recall system.

Making smaller statements can help. Smaller combination of words is nice to talk and also to hear. Every language has its uniqueness; if words are not properly used, meaning can change.

We should not worry about making mistakes. Nothing should hold us back more than trying to get the discussion to logical and rational. The moment we get worried about making mistakes our fear will prevent us from taking part in productive conversations and making productive contributions. Never get stuck.

Everybody makes mistakes even while speaking their own mother tongue or native language. They are called ‘slips of the tongue’. What is important is getting your message across, not whether you use all the right words, modulation, tenses, and so on. So, if you can’t think of the exact word, try saying things in another way. Even your facial expressions or body language can express what you want to say. Its common thing: 9 out of 10 people undergo this problem. Lethologica is termed as a psychological disorder that periodically hinders a person’s ability to clearly articulate their thoughts and they temporarily forget names in conversations, words and phrases.

When you are engaged in discussion, try to listen better. If possible, help the person who is getting stuck with a word and allow him/her to make the point clear. Memory improvement and listening better works to an extent, but training the brain in this regard needs to be done with care and deliberation.

The Literature review is a vital part of the research process.  You will gain important insights by reviewing assortment of literature available on your topic of research. By reviewing literature you will gain an approach, knowledge, and more awareness on your chosen topic for research. An in-depth literature evaluation will help you in setting the stage for a better-designed study and will help improve your chances in obtaining significant results.  Therefore, it is worth the time and effort to analyze it in right fashion.

Reviewing the literature involves finding the sources, analyzing, amalgamating, and interpreting. You might find incompatible and contrasting views expressed by different authors on your topic. These conflicting points of view might be the indicators of swerving theories within the same topic. To shape up a genuine research, you need to be aware of these conflicting theories as well. Remember, verity of arguments and your views add flavor to your thesis. Being aware of those theories will help you later in your life; you will be able to talk and apply your knowledge in your work from different perspectives.

The literature review is science as well as art. You can have it as chapter at the beginning of your thesis or it can even be involved as veiled literature review throughout the thesis. The literature review should be balanced with your thought process on the topic, your ideas are most important. Some researchers stuff half of their thesis with literature review. Keep in mind that the literature (secondary data) is somebody else’s idea and not yours. It is not new information either. Therefore, try to give something new by taking support of existing literature.

One common way to approach literature review is to start out broad and then become more specific by narrowing down the focus. This style of writing is called ‘An Inverted Triangle’. Usually, when researchers get a hang of their topic, they recognize that the readers/referees will skim the thesis to find points of relevance. The inverted pyramid style of writing presents the essential facts in the first paragraph, with a hope of drawing the reader into the narrative. This style is used in the majority of thesis/research papers.

This type of writing fashion enhances your writing: all the facts are presented in order of importance, with the most important information leading the narrative. This style of writing is quite creative and functional. The first paragraph usually answers who, what, when, where and why. The rest of the narration provides detailed descriptions, quotations from witnesses or experts, and background information that relates to the opening paragraph.

You will find literature from variety of sources such as previous research thesis, newspapers, periodicals, books, journals, abstracts, Internet, Wikipedia, news bulletins, television, radio etc.

A careful and exhaustive review of the literature helps you in following manner:

• Enables you to focus on the purpose of your study more precisely.
• It develops a conceptual or theoretical framework that might be useful to touch upon your research objectives.
• It also helps to identify key variables for easing your methodology.
• You can find inter relationships among the chosen variables to quantify the study.
• If you find a previous research on similar topic of yours, you can meaningfully extend it.
• A literature review helps you conclude relationship on current and past scenario.
• And, most importantly it helps you prepare validated questionnaires for collecting primary data.

Four of the most common formats of literature review are:

Historical Format: Here the review is organized chronologically.  This is preferred when focus is on the progression of research methods or theories, or a change in practice over time.

Conceptual Format: Review is organized according to relevant concepts and theories.

Methodological Format:  Where literature review organizes and shapes the format that of an empirical paper. This is used most often used in meta-analytic reports.

Hypothetical Format: The role of this form is to examine the quantity of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue. The hypothetical literature review helps to establish rationale based upon what theories already exist, the relationships between them, to what extent the existing theories have been examined, and to develop new hypotheses to be tested.

Lastly, this might sound a bit obscure but you will find that by reviewing other’s thesis, you will learn about the ways other people have constructed their own research work. Seeing what others have done, type of approach adopted by them, logic in organizing chapters might help you understand your own assignment. You might be able to see the methods that other, more experienced researchers have used and it might give you a fair idea to follow your own research methodology. As a researcher, you are required to write the literature review to summarize and discuss the major documents published in that topic in the past and present. The narration will take into account the methods and the results or findings of the most relevant tips. Your referees will assess whether the methodology is appropriate and whether the results seem valid. Don’t merely list books, documents, periodical, journals, and websites do read relevant points and discuss them. If your merely list unread references, your examiner might search for those references in your thesis and might raise objections.

In the words of Lawrence Clark Powell – “To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength”