Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

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Remember the elements of a good question we discussed earlier. Your essay will be an answer to the question you have formulated. Confine your paper to answering that question. The strongest papers answer one question convincingly, provide plenty of evidence and arguments to support the answer, and position the argument within the overall conversation in the field. This will often mean that you cannot publish a whole dissertation chapter in a journal article. Instead, you may need to take one argument or sub‐argument from the chapter and resituate it into a contemporary conversation in the literature.

The structure of your paper is as important as the content. Structure your outline so that it’s as easy as possible for a reader to follow your argument from beginning to end. Every good essay follows a strong narrative arc, and this should be displayed in your outline. This narrative arc can be a logical or historical progression, and it will constitute the structure of your argument. We like to have an outline in mind before we start writing. Others like to start writing and get inspiration and ideas before they start writing. However you begin, a good essay will follow a well‐structured outline.