On Writing a Good Conclusion
This is the fourth, and final, installment of my 'how to' series. If you'd like to check out the earlier ones, they are:
One of my favorite quotes on writing comes from the sociologist Howard Becker who said (about writing a conclusion), “What else is there to say when you’ve already said everything there is to say?” I think this aptly sums up how many of us feel by the time we reach the stage of writing a paper’s conclusion.
Most writers are exhausted by the time they reach the conclusion—and, too often, it shows! I’ve read many a paper where it was patently obvious that, by the conclusion, the writer had completely run out of steam. This is one more reason to start early enough so that you’re not writing right up until a submission deadline, but we all know that life doesn’t always cooperate on that front.
Over time, I’ve developed a simple rule of thumb for what a conclusion should include, and it’s basically a two-pronged approach. Depending on the length of your document, your conclusion might be just one paragraph, or it might be a several-paragraphs-long section. Either way, it should include these two things, in this order:
1) A restatement of your thesis
2) A (figurative) step outward where you put this thesis in some kind of larger
context and/or reflect on why it’s important
First things first, because I can tell you honestly that I could not have defined ‘thesis’ until I started teaching university-level writing, and that was after I’d finished my doctoral program—recall that your thesis is simply the main argument of your paper. It’s the point that you’re trying to make, by writing the thing that you’re writing. As such, it shouldn’t be too obvious. (It also shouldn’t be the exact same argument made by the author(s) you’re writing about, but more on that in a later post.) It shouldn’t be something that your readers will automatically agree with. Instead, it should require some convincing, i.e., argumentation, and that’s what is happening in the body of your paper (if all is going well). One of my students once referred to the thesis as your “hot take” on the topic, and I liked that. You’ve read (or watched, or interviewed, etc.) some sources that you’re now writing about—what’s your take on them? That’s your thesis.
But papers are long! And complex! And the human mind is fallible—your readers’ minds might have wandered off in all sorts of places, or their bodies may have wandered into the kitchen for a snack, between the time when they read your thesis in the introduction of your paper and when they read your conclusion, at the end.
So, the first order of business in your conclusion is always to summarize your thesis. Remind your readers: What was the point of all of this again? What were we doing here, together, in these pages? At a bare minimum, the conclusion should start off with a restatement of the main argument of your paper. In my time teaching expository writing at Harvard, I found that students were often concerned about sounding repetitive in their papers, so they avoided restating their argument. But this leaves the reader rudderless and flailing. Repeat yourself. I'm begging you--toss your reader a bone!
Another common problem was that students would attempt to restate their argument but, again, because they were concerned about sounding repetitious, or because they were striving for sophistication, they reworded their argument so completely that I ended up confused as to whether we were still talking about the same thing! Remember, you can’t plagiarize yourself. Your conclusion is not the place to take out the thesaurus and look for synonyms. Choose a vocabulary for your paper—a set of keywords that you will return to over and over—and be consistent in your use of those terms (e.g., if you start talking about “cognition” don’t refer to it as “thinking” in your conclusion). Clarity over variety—that is the guiding principle here.
So, to review, the very first thing that you’re doing at the beginning of the conclusion is reminding readers of the main argument your paper set out to prove. If you want a gold star, however, you can do more than this. In one of my favorite books on academic writing, The Imaginative Argument, Frank Cioffi introduces the concept of a “delta thesis.” A delta thesis is a thesis that has evolved, and become richer, over the course of the paper. The idea is that, in the body of the paper, you’ve tested the thesis. You have introduced evidence for and against it, you may have modified your argument somewhat as you’ve dealt with counterarguments. You may have added caveats or conditions. Thus, by the end of the paper, your thesis should be richer, deeper, than the statement you presented in your introduction. It’s not an entirely new idea, obviously, but it’s a deeper take, a more complex iteration. That’s Cioffi’s idea of a delta thesis. State it here, at the beginning of your conclusion. You can also briefly remind your readers of the broad strokes of the argument you made throughout the paper, but avoid doing a one-sentence summary of each paragraph, as that feels too formulaic.
The second “move,” in my two-pronged approach to writing a conclusion is to take a metaphorical step back and examine the issue you’ve just written about from a higher perspective. Why does this matter? What are the consequences for what you’ve just argued? Where do we go from here? How does this one, little paper, this one, little argument fit into the bigger picture (of the field, in historical context, etc.)? Put your argument in context. One caveat—the step outward can’t be too big. It has to feel related to the main argument; the move should feel organic. You don’t want readers thinking, “Boy, that really came out of left field! Why didn’t she mention that earlier?” when they get to your conclusion.
If you get stuck on how to do this second part, a tip I used to give students is to write the prompt: “What do I know now that I didn’t know before I wrote this paper?” at the top of a blank page. Do some free-writing in response to that prompt, and I bet you’ll come up with something to say about the larger significance, or the significance in context, of your argument.
We put most of our energy into thinking about how to begin papers, but conclusions matter too. As humans, our readers crave the feeling of closure—that sense that things have been “wrapped up,” at least for now, at least in interim fashion. At the same time, a conclusion that forces closure, wraps things up too superficially, or overreaches when stating the significance of the argument in a larger context, is inherently unsatisfying and rings false.
As writers, we must always strive to be trustworthy narrators for our readers—we are their guides through this material. Thus, we don’t need to come off as if we have produced the final word on a topic. But we do need to wrap up; we need an ending note--or, in musical terms, perhaps we could think of it as a rest.
What do we know now that we didn’t know before?
That’s a great place to leave your readers.
Happy writing!
Image by Crawford Jolly via Unsplash