Introductions and Conclusions from Models
Professional Examples: Introductions 1-13; Conclusions 15 – 26
AP Examples: Introductions 14 – 26; Conclusions 1-13
Introductions
1. It’s 28 years since the founding of NOW, and boys still like trucks and girls still like dolls. Increasingly, we are told
that the source of these robust preferences must lie outside society – in prenatal hormonal influences, brain
chemistry, genes – and that feminism has reached its natural limits. What else could possibly explain the love of
preschool girls for party dresses or the desire of toddler boys to own more guns than Mark from Michigan.
2. I am a peace-loving woman. But several events in the past 10 years have convinced me I’m safer when I carry a
pistol. This was a personal decision, but because handgun possession is a controversial subject, perhaps my
reasoning will interest others.
3. Everybody wears them. The Gap sells them. Fashion designers Dolce and Gabbana have lavished them with
jewels. Their previous greatest resurgence occurred in the 1950’s, when Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski wore
on in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire. They are all the rage.
4. Should America pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves forcibly brought here 300 or more years
ago? It’s a question that has been raised many times since the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery some
130 years ago and has most recently gained attention because of a book written by Randall Robinson, The Debt:
What America Owes to Blacks.
5. The town dump of Whitemud, Saskatchewan, could only have been a few years old when I knew it, for the village
was born in 1913 and I left there in 1919. But I remember the dump better than I remember most things in that
town, better than I remember most of the people. I spent more time with it, for one thing; it has more poetry and
excitement in it than people did.
6. Long before I began Dumpster diving I was impressed with Dumpsters, enough so that I wrote the MerriamWebster research service to discover what I could about the word Dumpster. I learned from them that it is a
proprietary word belonging to the Dempster Dumpster company. Since then I have dutifully capitalized the word,
although it was lowercased in almost all the citations Merriam-Webster photocopied for me. Dempster’s word is
too apt. I do not know anyone who knows the generic name for these objects. From time to time I have heard a
wino or hobo give some corrupted credit to the original and call them Dipsy Dumpsters.
7. My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food –
compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because
he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, hear bursting, body cooling and forsaken on
the linoleum of my brother’s trailer. The story continues for my brother, my sister, my mother, and me, and will
continue so long as memory holds.
8. While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to
claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion – namely, that I myself could not think at all.
9. Perhaps we all have the same memory of the first boy-girl party we attended. The floors were waxed, the music
loud, the air thick with the smell of cologne. The boys stood on one side of the room and the girls on the other,
each affecting a nonchalance belied by the shuffling male loafers and the occasional high birdlike sound of a
female giggle.
10. Motherhood is in trouble, and it ought to be. A rude question is long overdue: Who needs it? The answer used to
be (1) society and (2) women. But now, with the impending horrors of overpopulation, society desperately doesn’t
need it. And women don’t need it either. Thanks to the Motherhood Myth – the idea that having babies is
something that all normal women instinctively want and need and will enjoyed doing – they just think they do.
11. When I was teaching English at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, I used to ask my students the kinds of
questions that English teachers usually ask about reading assignments – questions designed to bring out the
points that I had decided they should know. They, on their part, would try to get me to give them hints and clues
as to what I wanted. It was a game of wits. I never gave my students an opportunity to say what they really
thought about a book.
12. A great majority of our nine million college students are not in school because they want to be or because they
want to learn. They are there because it has become the thing to do or because college is a pleasant place to be;
because it’s the only way they can get parents or taxpayers to support them without working at a job they don’t
like; because Mother wanted them to go, or some other reason entirely irrelevant to the course of studies for
which college is supposedly organized.
13. It is generally assumed that torture is impermissible, a throwback to a more brutal age. Enlightened societies
reject it outright, and regimes suspected of using it risk the wrath of the United States.
14. Though these two poems by Dickinson and Frost share the element of dark or night, the poets speak from very
different perspectives. Dickinson’s “darkness” connotes uncertainty and change, while the speaker of Frost’s
poem imbues night with a far more negative and desolate meaning.
15. The journey of mankind has been a long and arduous path, without the accomplishment of actually discovering
the meaning of life. In the novel Candide, the young noble travels around the world in order to answer a single
question, “Is this the best of all possible worlds?” Even as the world seems to be against him, Candide is unable
to comprehend why this world should not be the best of all possible worlds. Why would God create a world that is
not the best possible? Candied continues to travel around the world intent upon finding the answer to the age-old
question.
16. People’s attitudes toward Eros, the Greek god of love, often mirror their own opinions about love itself. Thus,
since many are perplexed and frustrated by love, they have mixed feelings about Eros. Both Robert Bridges and
Anne Stevenson express this confusion in their poems addressed to Eros; however, they clearly have different
underlying assumptions about love.
17. The concluding scene of King Lear, in which Lear dies while clutching the lifeless body of his youngest daughter,
Cordelia, serves to illuminate the greater meaning of the work as a whole. Lear had previously banished Cordelia,
the only daughter who truly loved him, from his Kingdom. It is not until this final scene when Lear realizes
Cordelia’s love after the treachery of his other daughters, Regan and Goneril, and overcomes his earlier
blindness. Lear’s conflict is finally and tragically resolved, and with it all of his preceding torment.
18. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the seminal 20th century American novel, and while being a vivid and
enthralling illustration of the Jazz Age, it is entirely tragic in scope on all three scales of tragedy – personal, interpersonal, and societal. The tragic figure, of course, is Jay Gastsby.
19. In a scene from the novel Kiss and Tell, British novelist Alain de Botton humorously depicts the relationship
between a set of socially oblivious, rather crass parents and their embarrassed adult daughter Isabel. Using
believable dialogue; detailed, vivid characterization; and an absurd situation, de Botton creates a scene that
brings comic delight out of the universal experience of a child’s humiliation by her parents.
20. To Hardy, the loss of the Titanic was no frustrating result of combined human vanity and human fragility before
tremendous natural forces. Instead, it was Destiny, the realization of some grandiose, divinely-conceived cosmic
drama.
21. In his poems addressing the appalling conditions of the child chimney sweeps in the 18th century, William Blake
skillfully manipulates poetic techniques such as imagery, juxtaposition, and diction in order to poignantly convey
the lives of these unfortunates. Common themes and images between the two poems, perhaps with slightly
different background stories, reiterate the poet’s feelings toward the minute laborers, and effectively evoke strong
emotional responses from the reader.
22. In “Birthday Party,” a wife in her late thirties hopes to surprise her husband with a glossy cake as a symbol of her
love. However, the husband reacts with embarrassment and anger. The author, Katharine Brush, makes the
reader feel disgusted by the man’s heartlessness. Brush asserts that these small gestures of affection are of the
greatest importance, and represent a potential heartbreak.
23. As individuals in an ever-growing, ever interconnected society, we are all at some point simultaneously pursuing
“that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.” And as such, we tend to sympathize
with characters in whom we see this same trait reflected. Nick Carraway, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby, is one such character who realizes, after conforming with societies of all classes, that the “outward
existence” led by many does all but define “the inward life.” His realizations of the transient, transparent, and
innate aspects of human nature are reflected in his inward questioning of his relationships with Jay Gatsby, Daisy,
and Tom Buchannan; and he understands, while conforming to their lifestyle, the delusions they are themselves
blind to.
24. Homer’s Odyssey is regarded as perhaps the greatest epic poem of all time. Its intricate plot, poetic imagery, and
timelessness give modern authors ample opportunity to reinterpret its content, sometimes in startlingly different
ways. In the Odyssey, the narrator Odysseus portrays the Sirens as possessing song that is so beautiful and
tempting as to require heroic levels of restraint. Margaret Atwood, however, uses tone, point of view, diction, and
imagery to portray the Sirens as down-to-earth and cynical creatures.
25. Looking strictly at the subject matter and structures of the poems by Wordsworth and Dunbar, one would imagine
they were carbon copies of each other. Both start with calls to visionaries of the past, describe the present scenes
of trouble, and then end with memories of the great qualities of the two leaders. However, while the subject matter
and even some of the imagery, the ocean for example, link the two, the tone and style, and thus the meanings, of
the two poems are completely different.
26. In Seamus Heaney’s poem “Blackberry-Picking”, the use of juicy diction, clear and vivid imagery, slant rhyme and
conversational rhythm, along with casual form illustrate the poet’s message that the childhood experience of
picking berries holds a deeper metaphor for life; that is, childish hopes continue to exist despite the continual slap
of reality.
Conclusions
1. Thus, in using different techniques the two poems come off with contrasting tones despite being on the same
subject. While Wordsworth’s poem seems to demand that Milton return and with his god like powers put English
to right, Dunbar’s poem seems more like a longing for Douglass and his guidance to return but also a resignation
that he will not.
2. While both Bridges and Stevenson question the god of love, they have differing attitudes toward both him and
love itself. Bridges seems to demonstrate honest curiosity, but Stevenson seems bitter and mocking in her
questions. In the end, the poets seem as unsatisfied as they began.
3. The dissimilar structures of the poems further reinforce their differences. The pauses created by the interrupting
dashes in Dickinson’s poem create a feeling of tentativeness and suggest the hesitance experienced by those
who are left in the “dark” to find their own path. Frost organizes his poem in solid, uniform lines, similar to the fixed
and certain gloom cast by the images throughout the piece. Thus, both poets use style to tie together their poems,
creating a unified, impressive effect.
4. The novel Candide does not offer the quick-and-easy answer to the meaning of life or offer the path to paradise.
Rather it reemphasizes the age-old lesson that for the best of all possible worlds to fully exist, all people must
accept and love one another. With that accomplished the best of all possible worlds will exist. It is not an easy
taste to love, for as Kahlil Gibrar states in his poem The Prophet, loving also entails pain. Despite being opposite,
the two are linked and absolutely vital to one another. Because of this tragic bond, massive change is impossible,
doomed for failure from the beginning. But Candide’s method of each person “tending” to his or her own garden,
is the true gateway to the best of all possible worlds.
5. Atwood provides a stark contrast to the “original” Sirens. Homer’s Sirens are so tempting and beautiful that they
are a great challenge for Odysseus. Atwood’s “Siren Song,” from the point of view of the Sirens, portrays them as
more comic than poetic. Each, however, is consistent in its use of tone, point of view, and imagery, and raises the
question for the reader of which depiction can be considered “truer.” Perhaps this contrast shows that reality can
be interpreted in many quite diverse ways.
6. Brush believes that these seemingly small gestures have the utmost importance. When the narrator witnesses,
along with the reader, the husband’s rejection of his wife’s sincere affection, the tragedy of such heartlessness is
clear.
7. …Ultimately, it is not until this final scene that the discussion of the play’s themes is resolved. The tragic
consequences of Lear’s blindness and his daughters’ treachery make his and Cordelia’s death inescapable. The
tragic conclusion provides a foundation for serious reflection on the major themes introduced in the work, centrally
blindness, injustice, loyalty, parent-child relationships, the relationship between man and god, and the human
condition. The converging of all these key themes in the death of Lear as he clutches the lifeless Cordelia,
reinforces the meaning of the play and ultimately illuminates the…
8. Like the Titanic and the iceberg, what the speaker says and how he says it are “twin halves of one.” The poetic
devices outlined above establish symmetry, harmony and order; these three elements are vital to the poem’s
dignity; this dignity is demanded by the elevated cosmic theme the poem speaks of.
9. The universal experience of humiliation by parents, vividly drawn in this excerpt, is, by its nature, agonizing, but it
also can be a source of great comedy.
10. …This last epiphany of sorts, and relief/resolution of his tension, is perhaps among the most crucial of Fitzgerald’s
messages and meanings – that life, making us see what we can only see (the past), is pushing us unconsciously
in the direction of dreams already faded, opportunities already gone. And only we can battle it, take it, swim with it
or against, wish as much control as we can, if we do so inwardly questioning.
11. …Gatsby was an enormous figure, far too big even for the decadent age that he reigned over, and his inability to
grasp what he truly wanted destroys him in the end. In a way, Gatsby, who catered to the pandering rich with his
parties and praise, helped to bring about their collapse by encouraging their lifestyle; in a much bigger way,
however, he was an idealist who was destroyed by the foundationless generation that he was too good for. The
demise of Gatsby, his acquaintances, and his era were preordained long before Jay Gatsby met Daisy Fay.
12. The ideals of natural preservation, although tainted by inevitable decay of what is worked for, are perpetuated not
by the physical salvation of nature’s goods, but by the internal value that is placed on nature. In “Blackberry
Picking,” the adult reflection upon the childhood innocence of that hope is reflected poignantly by the lush
descriptions and imagery of a memory that in some way, rings true to us all.
13. Blake skillfully arouses sympathy from his readers for the miserable lives of the child chimney sweeps in his
poetry through manipulation of imagery, diction, and childhood innocence, and evocatively depicts their miserable
lives.
14. Therein lies perhaps the worst difficulty: that this name for this shirt teaches the wrong thing about men. Some
articles quote women who felt the shirts looked great, especially on guys with great bodies. One woman stated
that it even made guys look “manly.”
So manly equals violent? Not by me, and I hope not by anyone on any side of age 25.
15. College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who
would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a
holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to
find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead.
16. If I were to go back to the headmaster’s study and find the dusty statuettes still there, I would arrange them
differently. I would dust Venus and put her aside, for I have come to love her and know her for the fair thing she
is. But I would put the Thinker, sunk in his desperate thought, where there were shadows before him – and at his
back, I would put the leopard, crouched and ready to spring.
17. We must treat a firearm’s power with caution. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,”
as a man (Lord Acton) once said. A pistol is not the only way to avoid being raped or murdered in today’s world,
but, intelligently wielded, it can shift the balance of power and provide a measure of safety.
18. At the end of her freshman year in college a girl I know wrote home to her mother, “Hooray! Hooray! Just think – I
never have to take English any more!” But this girl had always been an excellent English student, had always
loved books, writing, ideas. It seems unnecessary and foolish and wrong that English teachers should so often
take what should be the most flexible, exciting, and creative of all school courses and make it into something that
most children can hardly wait to see the last of. Let’s hope that we can and soon will begin to do much better.
19. I still do – once a week, perhaps, a glass of wine, a can of beer, nothing stronger, nothing more. I listen for the
turning of a key in my brain.
20. The nation might well have been a better place if, immediately after the Civil War, every former slave had been
given 40 acres and a mule, as the government promised. But the best we can hope for now is that we recommit
ourselves to the simple goal of treating all men as equals and affording every American equal opportunity to
achieve what he or she can.
21. There is little danger that the Western democracies will lose their way if they choose to inflict pain as one way of
preserving order. Paralysis in the face of evil is the greater danger. Some day soon a terrorist will threaten tens of
thousands of lives, and torture will be the only way to save them. We had better start thinking about this.
22. I remember that goat; I regret him yet. Poetry is seldom useful, but always memorable. I think I learned more from
the town dump than I learned from school: more about people, more about how life is lived, not elsewhere but
here, not in other times but now. If I were a sociologist anxious to study in detail the life of any community, I would
go very early to its refuse piles. For a community may be as well judged by what it throws away – what it has to
throw away and what it chooses to – as by any other evidence. For whole civilizations we have sometimes no
more of the poetry and little more of the history than this.
23. Feminists are often accused of imposing their “agenda” on children. Isn’t that what adults always do, consciously
or unconsciously? Kids aren’t born religious, or polite, or kind, or able to remember where they put their sneakers.
Inculcating these behaviors, and the values behind them, is a tremendous amount of work, involving many adults.
We don’t have a choice, really, about whether we should give our children messages about what it means to be
male and female – they’re bombarded wit them from morning till night.
The question, as always, is what do we want those messages to be?
24. While motherhood is no longer culturally compulsory, there will, certainly, be less of it. Women are now
beginning to think and do more about development of self, of their individual resources. Far from being selfish,
such development is probably our only hope. That means more alternatives for women. And more alternatives
mean more selective, better, happier, motherhood – and childhood and husbandhood (or manhood) and
peoplehood. It is not a question of whether or not children are sweet and marvelous to have and rear; the
question is, even if that’s so, whether or not one wants to pay the price for it. It doesn’t make sense any more to
pretend that women need babies, when what they really need is themselves. If God were still speaking to us in a
voice we could hear, even he would probably say, “Be fruitful. Don’t multiply.”
25. Anyway, I find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I think this is an attitude I share with
the very wealthy – we both know there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the ratrace millions who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.
I am sorry for them.
26. I have just met the dance downstairs. My elder son has one of his best friends over, and he does not care that
she is a girl, and she does not care that he is a boy. But she is complaining that he is chasing her with the plastic
spider and making her scream, and hi is grinning maniacally because that is just exactly the response he is
looking for, and they are both having a great time. Two children, raised in egalitarian households in the 1980s.
Between them the floor already stretches, an ocean to cross before they can dance uneasily in one another’s
arms.