An Introduction to Conclusions

1. Never write a conclusion unless you know what you want to make that conclusion do.
   

   • Use conclusions to summarize--only if that summary is necessary. Don't repeat what you've said unless what you've said is fuzzy, very complex, confusing, or if your paper is long and you need to put all the pieces in one place.
     
   • Use conclusions to underscore important points, especially if you've made a number of less-important points along the way.
     
   • Use conclusions to suggest implications. (What direction will your conclusions lead? What can people do with this knowlege? How will the conclusions help other investigators?)
     
   • Use conclusions to qualify your conclusions. (In what contexts do your conclusions make sense? Are there risks involved in applying your conclusions? What further experiments, investigations are necessary before you can be positive you are right?
     
   • Use conclusions to remind readers of your previous disclaimers (about scope, importance, relevance, limitations, etc.)

2. Try not to use conclusions to introduce new points, especially if your new points are more interesting than the ones you've just discussed. [English teachers often try to get students to introduce something new in their conclusions, but that's very risky, vague advice.]
   
3. Try not to use conclusions simply because papers always have beginnings, middles, and ends. [People who learn to write five paragraph themes or who take Aristotle too seriously often think that everything needs a conclusion to finish it up, to round it out, to make it somehow visually appealing. But that's baloney.]
   
4. Try not to worry about ending with a zippy quotation, words of advice from Albert Schweizer, Thomas Merton, Shakespeare, Baba Ram Das, Margaret Thatcher, or Bill Cosby.
   
5. Try not to put quotations in your conclusions simply to show that other, more famous people agree with you or can say things better than you can say them. [Students, who often have no power of their own, sometimes try this ploy to get some power, some credibility. They think that they can get this power by associating themselves with the bigshots, the high rollers, the BIG BRAINS who write the BIG BOOKS.]
   
6. If you don't know what your conclusion is supposed to do, if your ideas are crystal clear, if your paper is very short and you've made your points with a sledgehammer or large mallet, then you may not need a conclusion at all.
   
7. If you can't write a conclusion, it may not be your fault. Sometimes (well, often) professors make students write about things that don't require conclusions. A typical assignment might look like this:

   Discuss X. In doing so, think about Y, Z, and Q with special attention to W and V.

   or:

   Compare X to Y and Z and show me that you've read X, Y, and Z.

   
   How do you write conclusions to such assignments? What will they look like?

   • In conclusion, I have looked at Y, Z, and Q who each think somewhat differently about X. Some are different and some are the same, but they are all part of the course and I have now talked about them.

   • In conconclusion, X is different from Y and slightly different from Z. The differences are important because they show I can see them and you can see that I see them, which is important. Q.E.D.

Got questions?
Hashimoto's Homepage