Thesis to Article: Advice for Authors from the Practical Theology Editorial Team

Most important is to recognise that: It is a further writing skill to turn an academic dissertation into an accessible, imaginative and thought-provoking journal article.

Articles for Practical Theology (BIAPT’s affiliated journal) are around 6000 words and clearly need to keep the reader engaged from beginning to end as they are not reading because they have to mark your work!

It is manifestly extremely difficult, if not impossible to summarise a whole thesis, whether at Masters or Doctoral level in a 6000-word article – and in any case the result may be highly unsatisfactory.  You will need to choose one focus, argument, theme or question you wish to address and illustrate it from your data and relate it to the literature and the field of practical theology.  Your supervisor(s) may have some helpful guidance.

At the same time, you need to stay academically rigorous and make your point with sufficient force and clarity. Ultimately you would like to be cited in other work which is evidence that you have contributed to learning in public space. Journal articles are, in a way, the academic equivalent of a tweet!

So, in choosing your focus for the article do discern a manageable subject, adjust the title accordingly and stay within the word limit as you make your cogent and focused argument. If you’d like any further advice on this you could write a possible abstract which one of the editors would comment on.

Then you probably need catch up with any work or articles completed in your field since you completed your thesis – in some fields things do move quite fast! Try also to look for Practical Theology articles that might connect to your subject, but which you may have overlooked in the thesis.

Bear in mind you are now writing for an international audience so try not to make too many assumptions about what readers will know about your own context.

Perhaps another way forward would be to look at a few examples of articles in our journal and then decide on your approach with the work you have before you. Choose ones which have qualitative data collection and analysis to compare with, if that is what you are going to present. A good example would be; Anna Thompson’s “Holy Sofas: Transformational Encounters between Evangelical Christians and Post-Christendom Urban Communities” and there are more below.

Some parts of your thesis may be used verbatim (though think very carefully how they will be received by readers), other parts may need re-writing and you may need to create new pieces altogether – of course overall, you’ll need to precis substantially. Try to get a balance of empirical field work evidence and your literature/reflective work as that becomes relevant to the subject you have chosen. We definitely need theology articulating clearly from your research throughout.

When you have had a go, if you like a PT editor can make some initial comments to you if you send it to them privately (email contacts below). If they think it needs further work before being submitted for peer review they will say so – and/or it could be then uploaded onto the journal’s website at Taylor & Francis where it will go into the reviewing process. If this all seems daunting then try to present your ideas for the article at a conference or seminar and get feedback. Your supervisor should welcome your offer to present your work to the next generation of students.

Some other possible examples:

D. K. Beedon, “Tilting at windmills? Pastorally inhabiting the hopelessness of prison life as a researching practitioner,” Practical Theology, vol. 14, no. 5 (2021): 402-415.

K. Stuerzenhofecker “Pluralising practical theology: international and multi-traditional challenges and opportunities,” Practical Theology, vol. 13, no. 1-2 (2020): 123-136.

S. J. Arthur, “Negotiating the non-negotiable: the Elim Pentecostal movement and theological normativity,” Practical Theology, vol. 13, no. 5 (2020): 466-479.

S. Shooter, “What on Earth Is She Thinking Of, Still Attending Church?” Practical Theology, vol. 6, no. 3 (2015): 257-270.

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© Nigel Rooms and Dustin Benac, 2022.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Editor: Nigel Rooms, nigel.rooms[at]churchmissionsociety.org.

Associate Editor: Dustin Benac, Dustin_Benac[at]baylor.edu.

Cover Image: “Writing” by jjpacres is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.