20. A Footnote about Footnotes

Someone once said to me that the perfect research essay would be one sentence long and the rest would be a single footnote.

I have no idea what they were drinking that night. I think they were having a go at the desperation some students have to slather everything in a think butter of footnotes such that the actual text of the essay virtually disappears.

It is worth just clarifying what footnotes are there for. The chief purpose of them is to serve as a place to put your references. It is an efficient way of showing that your statements rest on the authority of someone else and that you have researched your essay well. Of course, the Author-Date system asks you to put your references in brackets in the text, so footnotes won’t have that function then.

Do take care to make it clear how the reference relates to the text. If you’ve put a reference in at the end of the sentence ask yourself: what is it doing there? Is it that the author I am citing agrees with this point? Or disagrees? Or – well, what? A couple of short words can do the job here. Put a ‘so’ in front of the reference, for example, and you have indicated that the author concurs, and the reader knows exactly what the reference I demonstrating.

One other use of footnotes is to provide a bit of butt cover. What do I mean? Indicate by means of a footnote where there are unexplored avenues. Let the reader know that you are aware of tracks you might have followed, but chose not to. Protect yourself from the flank attack – the attack which says ‘weren’t you aware of Augustine’s views on the subject?’

Another purpose of footnotes is to provide interesting but non-essential commentary. Now you need to take great care here – don’t put something actually creative and vital in your footnotes that should be in the text. I say to my research students whenever I see an extended footnote ‘shouldn’t this be in the text?’ The footnote may be a sign of simple indecision on your part. If that’s the case – decide!

A teacher of mine used to say ‘footnotes should be fun’. I don’t think he meant that this was the place to put a couple of jokes you have lately heard. Rather – if you have a genuinely interesting diversion, then this is the place for it.

But remember: don’t try to hide, or look as if you are trying to hide, extra words in the footnotes. Most institutions will ask you to count footnotes in your final word count in any case.

19. Publishing your essay - why not?

An essay amounts to a great deal of work. Perhaps you spent 50 or more hours on it. It may have been a genuinely formative period for you as you worked through a theological issue at depth. You may have surprised yourself by finding that your mind has changed on a particular issue. Students often speak to me of their theology essay as a landmark in their formation as pastor-teachers. It seems a pity to let all that work only have a single reader – you marker.

What's more may be that the marking process has exposed some significant (or even just minor) flaws in your piece. It would be a pity to let the opportunity of revising the piece in the light of expert comment go to waste. Part of really learning is making the most of second chances.

You should ask yourself - what can I now do with this material?

That is not to say that every piece of theological essay work is ready for academic publication. By no means! But written publication takes many forms. And preparing for a public audience is a discipline that will refine your thinking even further.

So you need to take stock. It could be that your piece is truly outstanding and has been rewarded with the appropriate marks. This is still not to say that it is a piece of peer-reviewed material ready for the Scottish Journal of Theology, but perhaps it could be with a bit of spit and polish. Why not use some vacation time to really push the piece into the stratosphere? Take every bit of advice and criticism you can, and extend the work to give it a bit more depth perhaps. Ask your teachers what they would do. There are of course many journals that would publish work with not quite as much finesse - take The Churchman, or Anvil, or Reformed Theological Review. These second-tier journals might be a great place to put your work, and you'll find them grateful at least for your interest.

It could be, however, that your piece could be adapted to a magazine-style piece. This will need a bit of a change of tone, perhaps a sexier introduction, and a scalpel applied to some of your quotes and footnotes. Imagine an intelligent layperson as your reader, and try to explain the material to them. It will need a clear explanation of what the point of the exercise is. Make it into an article The Briefing could publish - you could take their articles as a model perhaps.

You could of course self-publish, on a blog or somewhere else on line, perhaps. The advantage of blogging is that you get exposed to the withering criticism of anyone who happens to happen by. But you may have to publish your piece in parts in order to make it digestible.

Why not consider how the things you have learnt would go at a seminar or workshop at a conference? Again, the trick is to see if you can make the ideas you have come up with switch genres - and to see if you can sharpen up your ideas in the light of the feedback you have got from the marking process.

18. Bringing home the bacon

The jet plane of your essay has left the tarmac and cruised at altitude for several thousands words. Now it is time to land this baby. I don’t know if you’ve been on a plane when the passengers break out into spontaneous applause the moment the plane is safely on the runway. That always rather bothered me – are their landings that don’t earn such applause? Could the pilot be persuaded by a lack of applause to try not so much the next time he flies? I’d rather landing be a kind of take-it-for-granted expectation, wouldn’t you?

In any case, you as the pilot of your essay have a job to do to make sure everything ends well. A good strong conclusion can leave a lasting impression that you were in control of your material, that no threads were left untied, and that you had a clear mind as to the argument you were pursuing.

Most often a conclusion will be a paragraph that adds nothing new to the essay but just makes for a clean finish. This is the most basic form of conclusion. Don’t introduce a new writer to quote, or a new piece of information, or a new angle on the question. Return to the question itself, and make sure you have the terms of the question included in the way you phrase your conclusion – don’t leave anyone in anyone doubt that you have actually answered the question.

But there’s another way to go here, especially if you have a bit of space. Why not consider for a while what the implications or possible implications of your argument are? Having established your argument, now consider: what does this mean in terms of your theological thinking more generally? Theology is a discipline that hangs together. Each bit effects each other bit. If you establish something in eschatology, for example, it will have implications for your doctrine of creation. You will always have something to say at this point. If you have decided that the resurrection of Jesus was indeed bodily, and established this from a convincing theological argument, then ask: what will this mean for our doctrine of creation? What will this mean for how we think about salvation?

Often, this is the chance to bring some ethical observations to bear by asking: what does this mean for the life of church or the life of the individual believer in the world? What difference does this argument make in those contexts?

This is a chance to be bold and imaginative. You can insure yourself against the risk of being a bit speculative here by giving a slight moderation or qualification to your statements. It is perfectly acceptable to use the subjunctive here – ‘it could be said’, ‘it might be the case’, ‘possibly’, and so on. But you are showing yourself to have initiative and a bit of originality, so the risk is certainly worth it.

Do make sure with your conclusion that any promises you have made in your essay have been fulfilled. Go back over your essay and see if you can spot where you might have made a claim about what your essay will do – and then either make sure your essay has done this, or modify the claim according to what you actually have done! It might be that in your final paragraphs you have an opportunity to address those promises explicitly.

If you are short of words, your conclusion need not be long. A sentence might be enough. But an essay with no conclusion remains curiously unpersuasive. We are left asking ‘what did it all amount to?’ Make sure the reader knows exactly what it amounted to.

16c How to write well in an essay

I can give you tips to improve the clarity of your writing, but the best way to become a good writer is to expose yourself to good writing. Often, I have to say, theologians are terrible writers – or, their work is read by us in translation from German or Latin. You aren’t going to learn to write from them. You are, however, going to improve your ability to write by picking up a George Eliot novel, or a Jane Austen, or an Ernest Hemingway. (Find the English or History major in your class and ask them what they are reading!)

And anyhow, as a developing pastor-theologian, you should be cultivating the reading life. A young pastor I know has committed himself to reading for an hour a day – theology mostly, but certainly not only. While his example is outstanding, I am alarmed when I ask theological students in interviews whether they consider themselves a reader or not to find that most say ‘not really’. I am alarmed because these are people who are going to have words as the tools of their trade – shouldn’t they take every opportunity to sharpen them?

So what I am asking here is for a lifestyle choice. Become a reader – not because you will kick it in your theology essays, but because you will be a much better minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ if you are.