brycewang-stanford Argument Development (jaar-argument-development)
JAAR's own guidance is blunt: an article must "have a point." Description, summary, or a tour of a tradition will not do — the essay must argue something a competent reader could dispute, and defend it with evidence and method. This skill turns material into a thesis-driven argument.
When to trigger
- The material is rich but the "so what / what am I claiming?" is thin
- A reader called the draft "descriptive," "a survey," or "without a thesis"
- You need to sharpen a contestable claim and its stakes
- Reconciling a complex case with a single throughline
Build the argument
- State the thesis as a claim, not a topic. Not "this article examines ritual X" but "ritual X works as Y, which means the category Z should be rethought." It must be contestable.
- Make the stakes explicit. Why does the claim matter to the study of religion (tie back to
jaar-scholarly-positioning)? What changes if you are right? - Lay out the line of reasoning. Each section advances the argument; a reader can see how evidence (texts, history, fieldwork) and method support the claim.
- Anticipate the strongest objection and answer it in the body — concede what is fair, rebut what is not.
- Earn the conclusion. End with what the argument establishes and its broader implication, not a summary of what you "discussed."
Argument types that land at JAAR
- Recategorization — a familiar phenomenon is better understood under a different concept.
- Method critique/proposal — how we study religion here should change, with a demonstration.
- Comparative claim — juxtaposing cases yields a general insight neither gives alone.
- Reinterpretation — a text/tradition/episode means something other than the standard reading.
Anti-patterns
- A "topic" or "examination of" framing with no claim
- Description that never rises to an argument (the #1 JAAR rejection trigger)
- Burying the thesis on page 12; state it early and return to it
- An argument so tied to the case it teaches the field nothing (reframe via topic-selection)
- Over-claiming beyond what the sources and method support
Output format
【Thesis】one contestable sentence
【Stakes】what changes for the study of religion if true
【Line of reasoning】the steps each section takes
【Strongest objection】and the answer
【Implication】what the conclusion establishes
【Next】jaar-sources-and-evidence
Thesis-strength ladder (where editors place a claim)
Referees for the flagship AAR/Oxford University Press journal sort theses by how much they ask the study of religion to revise. Push a draft claim up at least one rung before submission; the bottom two rungs are where the "merely descriptive" desk-return begins.
| Rung | What the draft says | How a JAAR reader hears it |
|---|---|---|
| 0 — Topic | "This essay examines mortuary ritual in X" | No claim; a survey |
| 1 — Description-plus | "X ritual is more varied than assumed" | Local; specialist-only |
| 2 — Reinterpretation | "X is better read as boundary-work, not purification" | A contestable reading |
| 3 — Recategorization | "Cases like X show the purity/danger frame mis-sorts a class of rites" | JAAR's target intervention |
Hedged calibration: editors do not publish a rubric of "rungs"; this is a heuristic distilled from JAAR's stated "must have a point" demand and broad-interest mandate — confirm current expectations against the journal's submission guidelines, which shift between editorships.
Worked vignette: a comparative ritual essay finds its point
A scholar drafts "Threshold Offerings in Two Pilgrimage Sites," describing food offerings left at a Marian shrine in Italy and at a Sufi dargah in the Deccan. A colleague flags it as "two thick descriptions and a shrug." Running it through the ladder:
- Thesis as claim, not topic. From "examines offerings at two sites" to: threshold offerings at both enact a contract with a saintly intercessor that scholarship files under "popular piety" — a residual category hiding a shared transactional logic (the comparative claim type above).
- Objection, answered. A specialist calls the cases incommensurable; the author concedes the
cosmologies differ, then defends the tertium comparationis (the intercessory contract, not the
theology) — handing reflexivity work to
jaar-theory-and-method. - Earned conclusion. Not "I discussed two sites" but what the recategorization buys: a cleaner analytic for transactional devotion.
Referee pushback → the JAAR-specific repair
- "Descriptive; I waited for the argument" → hoist a rung-2/3 claim into the first two pages.
- "Interesting only to specialists" → re-state the implication for a category generalists share.
- "Reads as advocacy" → separate believers' claims from your analytic claim.
Supplementary resources
../../resources/official-source-map.md— the "have a point" / analysis-over-description requirement