Catastrophe the Essay: Conclusions

So much is at stake in writing a decision. This is, after all, your last take chances to persuade your readers to your point of view, to impress yourself upon them every bit a writer and thinker. And the impression yous create in your decision will shape the impression that stays with your readers after they've finished the essay.

The end of an essay should therefore convey a sense of completeness and closure as well as a sense of the lingering possibilities of the topic, its larger meaning, its implications: the final paragraph should close the discussion without closing it off.

To constitute a sense of closure, y'all might do one or more than of the following:

  • Conclude by linking the last paragraph to the first, peradventure by reiterating a discussion or phrase you used at the kickoff.
  • Conclude with a judgement composed mainly of i-syllable words. Simple language can assistance create an result of understated drama.
  • Conclude with a judgement that'due south compound or parallel in construction; such sentences can establish a sense of residual or order that may feel just correct at the end of a circuitous give-and-take.

To close the give-and-take without closing information technology off, y'all might exercise one or more of the following:

  • Conclude with a quotation from or reference to a principal or secondary source, i that amplifies your master point or puts it in a different perspective. A quotation from, say, the novel or poem you're writing about tin can add texture and specificity to your word; a critic or scholar can help confirm or complicate your final bespeak. For example, you might conclude an essay on the idea of home in James Joyce's curt story collection,Dubliners, with information about Joyce's own complex feelings towards Dublin, his home. Or you might end with a biographer's statement about Joyce'southward attitude toward Dublin, which could illuminate his characters' responses to the city. But be cautious, peculiarly about using secondary cloth: make sure that yous get the terminal word.
  • Conclude by setting your discussion into a dissimilar, mayhap larger, context. For instance, you lot might end an essay on nineteenth-century muckraking journalism by linking it to a current news magazine plan like lx Minutes.
  • Conclude by redefining one of the key terms of your argument. For example, an essay on Marx'southward handling of the disharmonize betwixt wage labor and capital might begin with Marx's merits that the "capitalist economy is . . . a gigantic enterprise ofdehumanization"; the essay might end by suggesting that Marxist assay is itself dehumanizing because it construes everything in economical -- rather than moral or upstanding-- terms.
  • Conclude by considering the implications of your argument (or assay or discussion). What does your argument imply, or involve, or propose? For example, an essay on the novelAmbiguous Take a chance, by the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane, might open up with the idea that the protagonist's development suggests Kane's conventionalities in the need to integrate Western materialism and Sufi spirituality in modern Senegal. The decision might make the new but related signal that the novel on the whole suggests that such an integration is (or isn't) possible.

Finally, some advice on how non to stop an essay:

  • Don't simply summarize your essay. A brief summary of your statement may be useful, especially if your essay is long--more than 10 pages or so. Simply shorter essays tend not to crave a restatement of your main ideas.
  • Avoid phrases like "in decision," "to conclude," "in summary," and "to sum upwards." These phrases can be useful--even welcome--in oral presentations. Simply readers can see, by the tell-tale compression of the pages, when an essay is about to end. You'll irritate your audience if y'all belabor the obvious.
  • Resist the urge to repent. If you've immersed yourself in your subject, you now know a skillful deal more well-nigh it than you tin can possibly include in a five- or ten- or 20-page essay. Equally a consequence, by the time you've finished writing, yous may exist having some doubts nigh what you've produced. (And if you haven't immersed yourself in your subject, you lot may exist feeling even more than doubtful about your essay as y'all approach the conclusion.) Repress those doubts. Don't undercut your authority by saying things like, "this is just one approach to the subject; there may be other, better approaches. . ."

Copyright 1998, Pat Bellanca, for the Writing Heart at Harvard University