Developing a Narrative Arc for Your Cultural Anthropology Monograph

This blog post is about how to organize your arguments and develop a narrative arc in your cultural anthropology monograph.

In academic writing, scholars make arguments and work with concepts and themes. Arguments and unique concepts form the "currency" of intellectual exchange, and so it's worth taking the time to reflect on and uncover what arguments lie in your ethnography and anthropological theorizing. It's common for arguments to be buried, not developed clearly enough, or for there to be too many, with no decision made about which to center.

All this can potentially confuse or overwhelm the reader, and a lot of my work as a developmental editor deals with finding and evaluating arguments (and to a lesser degree, concepts) in a book manuscript or journal article.

When working on an academic book manuscript, consider carefully what arguments you want to make in each chapter, what the big argument (I call this the overarching argument) you want to make is, and how all the arguments in your book relate to one another. This is one reason why spending time developing your book proposal is a good idea: a well-developed book proposal will include all these arguments, although it is normal and very common not to have clarity on all your arguments when you write and submit the proposal.

Unless you are deliberately breaking with norms and writing experimental ethnography, your book’s arguments will work like a tree, with a clear hierarchy between them. The overarching argument is the tree trunk, and then you have chapter- and section-level arguments that form the branches and twigs.

Finding the overarching argument in your cultural anthropology monograph

Ideally, by the end of your revisions and peer review, you will have settled on one overarching argument. This is your book’s main takeaway. This argument should strike a balance between not being too general as a to be a bland truism, while not being too specific to be of little interest to scholars in other subdisciplines or fields. If the argument can be applied to other contexts, that is great in terms of widening your potential audience, and your publisher will love you forever as a wider audience equals more sales.

In cultural anthropology, this overarching argument could be a theoretical argument or an

ethnographic argument.

Chapter-level arguments

Chapter-level arguments are like branches that link to the main argument(s). If you follow this

approach, then the reader will have digested the overarching argument by the time they reach

the end of the book. You can think of these arguments like Russian dolls—some of the more

specific arguments will fit neatly inside the more general ones. You will also find a few

arguments that do not relate in an obvious way to the others. These are potential candidates for

pruning, depending on their relative importance.

If an argument is important but does not relate clearly to the others, you can sacrifice a certain

amount of cohesion and include that argument; how much you prune the argument tree is up to

you.

Developing a narrative arc

Ideally (and this isn’t always the case even in published monographs), you will discern some kind of progression in the arguments you make across the chapters. This progression is the narrative

arc (sometimes called a throughline)—a unifying thread that tells the main story of your book.

If your chapters relate to different historical periods, the narrative arc may be about a changing situation over time (for example: the peripheralization of the UK in global geopolitics).

The narrative arc could also be thematic (for example: workers try three strategies to improve their situation, but each works worse than the previous, leading workers to feel increasingly powerless).

Whichever approach you take, a narrative arc will involve telling some kind of story through

the progression of arguments across the chapters. This is relatively simple if you have a linear

chronology, as the cause-and-effect relationships will guide your narration. But as stated, you can also develop a narrative arc if you organize material thematically too. Or you could discuss themes

in increasing order of importance, for example, so the reader feels like they are getting

progressively closer to the heart of the matter.

A note on other approaches

You may wish to take a different approach or write an experimental text, an approaching I called Editing Otherwise—I welcome these kinds of projects and enjoy working on them. But for a first monograph in particular, I often recommend playing it safe, with a simple hierarchy of arguments.

Uncovering and advising on how to organize arguments in a book is one of the key parts of my job when I do a full developmental edit of a monograph draft, and this can be done before peer review, or alongside it—because developmental editing insights focus on big-picture aspects of how the material is organized and styled, whereas peer review is focused on expert evaluation and judging of the book.

This analysis draws heavily on Scott Norton’s book Developmental Editing, and in his second

edition, he also emphasizes in a new section, “A Few Notes on Cultural Assumptions,” how

this approach to arguments emerged from a German tradition of creating taxonomies.