Conclusions
By Worth Weller
What does a conclusion do?
• The conclusion indicates that a full
discussion has taken place and that
this is going to be the obvious stopping
point of the essay.
How do you do this?
• If your essay has a thesis, the conclusion is
the place where you restate it, often it a
slightly more complex fashion, and very
briefly reiterate the consequence and
importance of it. Very often this has a
philosophical note to it.
For example
• (From an essay advocating the death
penalty:
• It is hard to imagine anything worse than
being murdered while neighbors do nothing.
But something worse exists. When those
same neighbors shrink back from justly
punishing the murderer, the victim dies
twice.
Another example
• From an essay about the “dangers” of
the Internet:
• Internet technology must be at the
service of humanity and of or
inalienable rights. It must respect the
prerogatives of a civil society, among
which is the protection of children.
From Your Textbook
• If we are to prevent the expansion of policies such
as these, moving us further along the multilingual
path, we need to make a strong statement that our
political leaders will understand. We must let them
know that we do not choose to reside in a “Tower of
Babel.” Making English our nation’s official language
by law will send the proper signal to newcomers
about the importance of learning English and
provide the necessary guidance to legislators to
preserve our traditional policy of a common
language.
Key words:
• Many conclusions have keywords in
them that tell the reader outright he or
she is at the end of the essay.
From Your Textbook
• So the next time you see a story about how
women hate their jobs and want to go home,
or how women with good jobs are miserable
wrecks, or how some brain or body part
makes women unfit to be chief executive
officers, take it with a grain of salt. You may
not be hearing the cool, “objective” voice of
journalism, but the old, endlessly replaying
tapes of myth.
From Your Textbook
I know that films are make-believe. But too
many women TV reporters have paid too
may dues to let Tally Atwater stand as their
symbol. She succeeds without ever working
the phones, developing a source, covering a
beat or even a single story for more than a
few hours. It’s true that Redford and Pfeiffer
were nice to watch, especially in those
steamy love scenes. But their fun is over. I’m
going to be sending all the starry-eyed jobseekers to them.
Some Techniques
• End with a provocative statement
• (from an essay by Michael Maren, “The
Faces of Famine”):
• And if these are the faces of famine, perhaps
our first reaction should not be to reach for a
checkbook, but to take to the streets or at
least phone Washington.
More Techniques
• End with a vivid image
• (from Scott Momaday’s, “The Way to Rainy
Mountain”):
• She began in a high and descending pitch,
exhausting her breath in silence; then again and
again—and always the same intensity of effort, of
something that is, and is not, like urgency in the
human voice. Transported so in the dancing light
among the shadows of her room, she seemed
beyond the reach of time. But that was illusion; I
think I knew then that I should not see her again.
More Techniques
• End with a solution
• (from Barbara Ehrenreich’s, “A Step Back to
the Workhouse?”):
• The feminist position has never been that all
women must pack off their children and
enter the work force, but that all women’s
work—in the home or on the job—should be
valued and respected.
Another Technique
• If you are writing an argumentative or problem
solving paper, simply offer your solution
• (from Susan Estrich’s essay, “Separate is Better”):
• If girls don’t want to go to all-girls schools, or if
parents don’t want to send them, that’s their choice.
If the experiments with girls-only math classes or
boys-only classes should fail, then educators can be
trusted to abandon them. But short of that, let the
educators and the parents and the students decide,
and leave the lawyers and judges out of it.
Be Sure To…
• Include key words from your intro and
thesis statement in your conclusion
• This SHOWS the reader that you have
come full circle.
Introduction…
• Much in the same vein as South African novelist J.M.
Coetzee, in his postmodern text Waiting for the
Barbarians, uses the deeply disturbed and tortured white
Magistrate to explore the impossibilities of writing history
from any single point of view, William Faulkner and Toni
Morrison also break out of the modernist mode when
they repudiate the linear construction of history in which
the producers are submerged by the revealers. In
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison’s Beloved,
reoccurring nightmarish scenes told along an
unpredictable timeline by multiple, gothic voices evoking
vampires, ghosts, and decaying houses serve
deliberately and specifically to disturb the reader’s own
rigidly controlled knowledge of the legacy of Southern
history.
Conclusion…
– The gothic form, as an act of defiance, is the
critical tool for Morrison’s and Faulkner’s literary
projects, which like Coetzee’s, seek to disrupt the
Master narrative. For a change, as Morrison’s
and Faulkner’s characters tell and retell their
stories from ghostly and multiple points of view
and from a timeline that confounds the
expectations of the reader, the protagonists of
history are in control.
Avoid Certain Mistakes:
• Do not add new information to a conclusion
• Do not present a new thought or raise new
questions
• Do not ramble
• Avoid beginning your final paragraph with
finally, in conclusion, thus we see, or
anything that obvious (don’t insult your
reader).
Summary
Make sure your conclusion is:
• Drawn from the evidence
• Developed logically from the
introduction and body of the essay
• Includes key words from the intro
Summary (again)
• Most conclusions do summarize the main
points or at least restate the central thesis of
the discourse.
• But be careful – don’t over summarize and
don’t use the exact same sentences (avoid
sounding repetitious)
• and above all, don’t get sappy.