A few remarks on writing your exegetical paper
The exegetical process outlined and illustrated on these webpages will help you to "cover all the bases," and hopefully help you to find those aspects of the text that need investigation and clarification. When you write the paper, your goal is to weave these pieces together in a way that gives a clear, unified understanding of what this text is about and how it is working (i.e., it shows the reader why you arrived at your particular statement of the "primary impact"). While there is no single "correct" form for doing this, simply repeating the headings of the exegetical outline and filling in the blanks will not be sufficient. The vital concern is that your presentation allow you to show how each piece of your work contributes to an understanding of the text as a whole, rather than simply displaying the results of several isolated tasks. This will help your conclusions and thus proclamation flow from the text itself.
One suggestion (not a requirement) of how this might be done is as follows:
1. You might begin your paper with a short paragraph which indicates what you are doing, how you will proceed, and what is the main point or problem at stake here (i.e., why do you care, and why should your reader care, about this text?).
2. Translation, grammatical issues, and textual variants may be grouped together at or near the beginning of the paper, or may be dealt with in a verse-by-verse treatment which would make up the large middle of the paper.
3. Context within the letter will probably need treatment in its own paragraph or section. You may find it helpful to discuss this context at or near the beginning of the paper, to set the scene for the text you are interpreting, though it may also work well to place this discussion later in the paper (after you have shown what the text says, you can then show how it fits with the rest of the letter).
4. The outline, incorporating at least the matters of style & form that you find important for your exegesis, should be presented. If necessary, this may be followed by a paragraph explaining what you want noticed in the outline, as well as remarks about why the unit you have translated and outlined is the appropriate size for the pericope.
5. Key concepts, parallel passages, history / society, and sources should be worked into a section-by-section discussion of the impact and meaning of the text, following the major sections as indicated in your outline as the basic structure for your discussion of the text itself.
6. Primary impact will need to be clearly stated in its own paragraph or section.
7. Contributions from commentaries may be included wherever they are appropriate; of course, be sure to indicate the source of these comments.