Seeking Understanding

Helping Graduate Students to Write for Scholarly Journals in Religion

Abstract

Very few of us, in our doctoral training, were taught how to write for a scholarly audience. In my five years of editing the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), I learned more about scholarly writing (and publishing) than I learned in the previous 15 years as a university professor. This short article discusses scholarly writing, going over the basics of how scholarly journals in religion “work” at each step along the way after you submit a manuscript to them. It then provides information about what editors are looking for in successful submissions, and how writers should shape their manuscripts accordingly. My focus in the article is the training of graduate students to learn how to write for the “profession.”