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.