Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
How to end a piece of practice-based scholarship: implications that point forward, reflection that grows from the argument instead of decorating it, and an abstract written after everything else.
An empirical paper ends by looking back: here is what we found, here is what it means. A best-practice article ends by pointing forward, toward something that does not exist yet. I will argue that the forward-facing ending is the harder and more interesting problem, by working through its three parts (implications, reflection, conclusion), explaining why the abstract must be written last, and naming the one failure mode that wrecks the whole register: tack-on piety.
The implications section translates findings into requirements. Not "here is a nice idea" but "because my inquiry found this, the thing I build has to do that." De Kock calls the building phase "creation and second exegesis," which is the right frame: whatever you make will be read as carefully as any text, so this section is you writing the brief for that reading.
Treat your innovations as design constraints. Here is a test that costs you nothing. For each innovation you proposed, write one sentence beginning "the artifact will therefore need to..." If you cannot finish the sentence, the innovation is still too abstract, and this is where you sharpen it or admit it was decoration.
There is an image worth keeping: the two halves of a project, theory and practice, as a double helix winding into one strand of instructions for something new. Write a strong theory paper and a strong practice paper without letting them talk to each other and you have two half-articles. The convergence is the point, which is why implications are a hinge and not an afterthought.
Then the vocational reflection, and the danger I want to name precisely. Tack-on piety is a paragraph of religious language bolted onto an otherwise secular argument. It satisfies nobody: the secular reader skips it, the theological reader finds it thin, and the author knows the seam is visible. The cure is not less theology. The cure is theology with content, load-bearing rather than ornamental.
Integration works when the reflection grows out of what the inquiry revealed. Volf's account of work as vocation supplies the frame (best practice as faithful stewardship, not merely competent technique), and a substantive lens supplies the content. Carl Cassegård's critical theory of nature reads nature neither as raw resource nor as romantic other, but through the dialectic of capital, ecology, and society. Put that to your own innovation: is its relationship to creation extractive, restorative, or just indifferent? Ecotheology then offers the constructive answer where critical theory named the problem. Every artifact has a footprint, whether or not its designer chose to notice.
A conclusion consolidates; it does not introduce. Say plainly what you have answered and what remains open. No new evidence, no new citations, no final flourish that smuggles in a claim you never defended.
Write the abstract last, and write it as three moves only: name the gap, state the argument, signal the contribution. You cannot summarize an argument you have not finished making, which is the plain reason for the ordering. Resist the urge to walk through every section; an abstract is not a table of contents in prose. Editors deciding whether to send your paper out, indexers filing it, search engines surfacing it, all of them meet the abstract long before they meet you, and many meet nothing else.
Revision at this stage is mostly the discipline of deletion. When peer comments conflict, and they will (one reader wants more detail, another wants the same passage cut), your job is not obedience but adjudication: which change serves the argument? Reviewers suggest; the author decides. Keep your voice. And do not answer every complaint by adding words, because a stronger article is usually a shorter one. When a reader flags confusion, the fix is almost always to cut and clarify rather than to explain at greater length. Read the whole thing aloud, start to finish; your ear catches the tangled sentence your eye has learned to skip.
The cover letter is the last small piece of writing: the same three moves as the abstract, plus why this journal. Then stop.
The Postmodern Terminal >_