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 introductions.) Despite all my hints, helps, and activities, the students just didn't get it.

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

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

Why essay ends so hard to teach

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.

1. How did beats how to

My alternative to teaching the exercises and activities that produced no results is to avoid attempting to teach writing strategies for either introduction or conclusion paragraphs.

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 a how to approach, I use a how didapproach. More on that in a moment.

2. Focus on the 80:20 formula

Second, I tell students not to worry about having a long ending paragraph.

As a general guideline, I suggest students 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.

By my guideline, if students are required to write a 500-600 word essay, the introduction and conclusion together could be 100-120 words. If a student's sentences average 20 words, the introduction and conclusion together would be five to six sentences.

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

3. Skip essay ends in grading

Third, I ignore the 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:

1. The students have a conclusion paragraph.

2. No evidence is in the ending paragraph.

3. The ending lets the reader know the writer finished.

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

A sample introduction and conclusion

As we read essays, I have students 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?

By doing this sort of examination with a variety of nonfiction works, students see that there is not one answer to the problem of how to write a conclusion but a variety of answers. As they mature as writers, they develop intuitions about what kind of ending a particular piece of writing requires.