Teach how to write a conclusion
by encouraging writers' intuitions

Teaching how to write a conclusion is one of the two toughest tasks of the expository writing teacher. The other is teaching how to write an introduction.

After years of trial and error, I've gave up trying to teach either one—with a marked improvement in student writing when I gave up teaching how to write a conclusion or introduction.

Why essay ends so hard to teach

All my cool exercises and activities for teaching how write a conclusion have been dismal failures. My attempts to teach how to write introductions have been only marginally more successful.

How could that happen when I work so hard and am such a brilliant teacher?

Answer: Because I'm teaching beginning writers, not experienced ones.

Newbies can learn to write body paragraphs because those paragraphs can be reduced to a formula that doesn't change from essay to essay. The two ends of the standard expository essay cannot easily be reduced to a formula the way body paragraph development can.

Without a formula for developing their earliest essays, novice writers can be overwhelmed by the number of options available to them. The problems are compounded if the novice writer has a learning disability.

A minimalist solution to essay ends

My solution to teaching how to write a conclusion or introduction without the exercises and activities that produced no results is to avoid teaching the "how" in how to write a conclusion entirely.

First, I don't attempt to teach writing strategies for either introductions or conclusions.

Rather than teach students how to write a conclusion, for example, I discuss with them how an author constructed the conclusion as we read an expository nonfiction work.

In other words, instead of how to approach, I use a how did approach.

Second, I ignore both the introduction or conclusion in determining their essay grade until after students have a reasonably good grip on how to develop the body paragraphs of their essays.

I do look to see that

• The students have an introduction and a conclusion.

• They have a thesis statement in their introduction.

• The introduction doesn't open with the thesis statement.

• No evidence is in either the introduction or ending paragraphs.

• The ending lets the reader know the writer finished.

If beginning, struggling writers can get all that, that's good enough.

The opening-closing relationship

One of my students compared the essay's structure to an hour glass which has a funnel-shaped portion at both ends. Those funnels are the introduction and conclusion.

The introduction begins broadly and narrows; it is usually built on the inverted pyramid pattern. The conclusion begins narrowly and broadens. The essay's thesis is usually found at the narrowest parts of the funnels.

The thesis sentence won't be stated in the same way at both places. Nor is it likely to be stated the same way it appeared in the working thesis. It might only be hinted at. But it's almost certain to be there in some form.

A sample introduction and conclusion

When discussing with students how a writer constructed an essay, it can be useful to look at the beginning and ending paragraphs as a set.

The ending usually picks up ideas that were used in the introduction. Often it circles back, reversing the order in which ideas were introduced in the opening and ending with the idea that opened the essay.

Sample introduction

To illustrate, look at this totally absurd introductory paragraph.

The game of bowling was invented in Iceland on a Thursday in 1213 when Hermann Ice accidentally ran into a mound of snowballs his children had stockpiled for building snowmen. Mr. Ice was so annoyed that they had left the pile for him to fall over that he pitched the balls out. They rolled down the lane toward the outhouse. One struck Mrs. Ice and, as Mr. Ice said later, "knocked her off her pins." From that one-man beginning, bowling has grown into a popular league sport.

The thesis of the essay is that leagues contribute to the popularity of bowling. The thesis is only hinted at in this paragraph.

Sample conclusion

The conclusion for the essay turns the structure of the introduction upside down.

League play contributes to the enduring popularity of bowling. If Hermann Ice were alive today, chances are that at least one night a week he'd be down at the alley racking up points for his team.

See how the conclusion begins with the idea of bowling leagues and then refers to the opening anecdote about Hermann Ice?

As a general guidelines, I suggest allocating about 20 percent of an essay's length to the introduction and conclusion together. If writers have much less than 80% of their word count in their body paragraphs, chances are there is something amiss.

This sample introduction and conclusion shown above together total about 120 words. They would fit nicely into a 500-600 word essay.

Developing intuitions

By writing often enough, writers learn how to write without having to think deliberately about every step of what they are doing. One author refers to this as developing intuitions. We learn intuitions but we aren't taught them.

Literacy coaching makes students aware of how others have solved writing problems. They don't learn how to write a conclusion from reading, but they begin to develop intuitions about what kinds of solutions seem to solve certain writing problems.

As students master the 80% of the writing process that centers on the body paragraphs, they will gradually have time to experiment with different ways of beginning and ending their essays.