conclusion of essay

17 Essay Conclusion Examples (Copy and Paste)

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essay conclusion examples and definition, explained below

Essay conclusions are not just extra filler. They are important because they tie together your arguments, then give you the chance to forcefully drive your point home.

I created the 5 Cs conclusion method to help you write essay conclusions:

I’ve previously produced the video below on how to write a conclusion that goes over the above image.

The video follows the 5 C’s method ( you can read about it in this post ), which doesn’t perfectly match each of the below copy-and-paste conclusion examples, but the principles are similar, and can help you to write your own strong conclusion:

💡 New! Try this AI Prompt to Generate a Sample 5Cs Conclusion This is my essay: [INSERT ESSAY WITHOUT THE CONCLUSION]. I want you to write a conclusion for this essay. In the first sentence of the conclusion, return to a statement I made in the introduction. In the second sentence, reiterate the thesis statement I have used. In the third sentence, clarify how my final position is relevant to the Essay Question, which is [ESSAY QUESTION]. In the fourth sentence, explain who should be interested in my findings. In the fifth sentence, end by noting in one final, engaging sentence why this topic is of such importance.

Remember: The prompt can help you generate samples but you can’t submit AI text for assessment. Make sure you write your conclusion in your own words.

Essay Conclusion Examples

Below is a range of copy-and-paste essay conclusions with gaps for you to fill-in your topic and key arguments. Browse through for one you like (there are 17 for argumentative, expository, compare and contrast, and critical essays). Once you’ve found one you like, copy it and add-in the key points to make it your own.

1. Argumentative Essay Conclusions

The arguments presented in this essay demonstrate the significant importance of _____________. While there are some strong counterarguments, such as ____________, it remains clear that the benefits/merits of _____________ far outweigh the potential downsides. The evidence presented throughout the essay strongly support _____________. In the coming years, _____________ will be increasingly important. Therefore, continual advocacy for the position presented in this essay will be necessary, especially due to its significant implications for _____________.

Version 1 Filled-In

The arguments presented in this essay demonstrate the significant importance of fighting climate change. While there are some strong counterarguments, such as the claim that it is too late to stop catastrophic change, it remains clear that the merits of taking drastic action far outweigh the potential downsides. The evidence presented throughout the essay strongly support the claim that we can at least mitigate the worst effects. In the coming years, intergovernmental worldwide agreements will be increasingly important. Therefore, continual advocacy for the position presented in this essay will be necessary, especially due to its significant implications for humankind.

As this essay has shown, it is clear that the debate surrounding _____________ is multifaceted and highly complex. While there are strong arguments opposing the position that _____________, there remains overwhelming evidence to support the claim that _____________. A careful analysis of the empirical evidence suggests that _____________ not only leads to ____________, but it may also be a necessity for _____________. Moving forward, _____________ should be a priority for all stakeholders involved, as it promises a better future for _____________. The focus should now shift towards how best to integrate _____________ more effectively into society.

Version 2 Filled-In

As this essay has shown, it is clear that the debate surrounding climate change is multifaceted and highly complex. While there are strong arguments opposing the position that we should fight climate change, there remains overwhelming evidence to support the claim that action can mitigate the worst effects. A careful analysis of the empirical evidence suggests that strong action not only leads to better economic outcomes in the long term, but it may also be a necessity for preventing climate-related deaths. Moving forward, carbon emission mitigation should be a priority for all stakeholders involved, as it promises a better future for all. The focus should now shift towards how best to integrate smart climate policies more effectively into society.

Based upon the preponderance of evidence, it is evident that _____________ holds the potential to significantly alter/improve _____________. The counterarguments, while noteworthy, fail to diminish the compelling case for _____________. Following an examination of both sides of the argument, it has become clear that _____________ presents the most effective solution/approach to _____________. Consequently, it is imperative that society acknowledge the value of _____________ for developing a better _____________. Failing to address this topic could lead to negative outcomes, including _____________.

Version 3 Filled-In

Based upon the preponderance of evidence, it is evident that addressing climate change holds the potential to significantly improve the future of society. The counterarguments, while noteworthy, fail to diminish the compelling case for immediate climate action. Following an examination of both sides of the argument, it has become clear that widespread and urgent social action presents the most effective solution to this pressing problem. Consequently, it is imperative that society acknowledge the value of taking immediate action for developing a better environment for future generations. Failing to address this topic could lead to negative outcomes, including more extreme climate events and greater economic externalities.

2. Expository Essay Conclusions

Overall, it is evident that _____________ plays a crucial role in _____________. The analysis presented in this essay demonstrates the clear impact of _____________ on _____________. By understanding the key facts about _____________, practitioners/society are better equipped to navigate _____________. Moving forward, further exploration of _____________ will yield additional insights and information about _____________. As such, _____________ should remain a focal point for further discussions and studies on _____________.

Overall, it is evident that social media plays a crucial role in harming teenagers’ mental health. The analysis presented in this essay demonstrates the clear impact of social media on young people. By understanding the key facts about the ways social media cause young people to experience body dysmorphia, teachers and parents are better equipped to help young people navigate online spaces. Moving forward, further exploration of the ways social media cause harm will yield additional insights and information about how it can be more sufficiently regulated. As such, the effects of social media on youth should remain a focal point for further discussions and studies on youth mental health.

To conclude, this essay has explored the multi-faceted aspects of _____________. Through a careful examination of _____________, this essay has illuminated its significant influence on _____________. This understanding allows society to appreciate the idea that _____________. As research continues to emerge, the importance of _____________ will only continue to grow. Therefore, an understanding of _____________ is not merely desirable, but imperative for _____________.

To conclude, this essay has explored the multi-faceted aspects of globalization. Through a careful examination of globalization, this essay has illuminated its significant influence on the economy, cultures, and society. This understanding allows society to appreciate the idea that globalization has both positive and negative effects. As research continues to emerge, the importance of studying globalization will only continue to grow. Therefore, an understanding of globalization’s effects is not merely desirable, but imperative for judging whether it is good or bad.

Reflecting on the discussion, it is clear that _____________ serves a pivotal role in _____________. By delving into the intricacies of _____________, we have gained valuable insights into its impact and significance. This knowledge will undoubtedly serve as a guiding principle in _____________. Moving forward, it is paramount to remain open to further explorations and studies on _____________. In this way, our understanding and appreciation of _____________ can only deepen and expand.

Reflecting on the discussion, it is clear that mass media serves a pivotal role in shaping public opinion. By delving into the intricacies of mass media, we have gained valuable insights into its impact and significance. This knowledge will undoubtedly serve as a guiding principle in shaping the media landscape. Moving forward, it is paramount to remain open to further explorations and studies on how mass media impacts society. In this way, our understanding and appreciation of mass media’s impacts can only deepen and expand.

In conclusion, this essay has shed light on the importance of _____________ in the context of _____________. The evidence and analysis provided underscore the profound effect _____________ has on _____________. The knowledge gained from exploring _____________ will undoubtedly contribute to more informed and effective decisions in _____________. As we continue to progress, the significance of understanding _____________ will remain paramount. Hence, we should strive to deepen our knowledge of _____________ to better navigate and influence _____________.

In conclusion, this essay has shed light on the importance of bedside manner in the context of nursing. The evidence and analysis provided underscore the profound effect compassionate bedside manner has on patient outcome. The knowledge gained from exploring nurses’ bedside manner will undoubtedly contribute to more informed and effective decisions in nursing practice. As we continue to progress, the significance of understanding nurses’ bedside manner will remain paramount. Hence, we should strive to deepen our knowledge of this topic to better navigate and influence patient outcomes.

See More: How to Write an Expository Essay

3. Compare and Contrast Essay Conclusion

While both _____________ and _____________ have similarities such as _____________, they also have some very important differences in areas like _____________. Through this comparative analysis, a broader understanding of _____________ and _____________ has been attained. The choice between the two will largely depend on _____________. For example, as highlighted in the essay, ____________. Despite their differences, both _____________ and _____________ have value in different situations.

While both macrosociology and microsociology have similarities such as their foci on how society is structured, they also have some very important differences in areas like their differing approaches to research methodologies. Through this comparative analysis, a broader understanding of macrosociology and microsociology has been attained. The choice between the two will largely depend on the researcher’s perspective on how society works. For example, as highlighted in the essay, microsociology is much more concerned with individuals’ experiences while macrosociology is more concerned with social structures. Despite their differences, both macrosociology and microsociology have value in different situations.

It is clear that _____________ and _____________, while seeming to be different, have shared characteristics in _____________. On the other hand, their contrasts in _____________ shed light on their unique features. The analysis provides a more nuanced comprehension of these subjects. In choosing between the two, consideration should be given to _____________. Despite their disparities, it’s crucial to acknowledge the importance of both when it comes to _____________.

It is clear that behaviorism and consructivism, while seeming to be different, have shared characteristics in their foci on knowledge acquisition over time. On the other hand, their contrasts in ideas about the role of experience in learning shed light on their unique features. The analysis provides a more nuanced comprehension of these subjects. In choosing between the two, consideration should be given to which approach works best in which situation. Despite their disparities, it’s crucial to acknowledge the importance of both when it comes to student education.

Reflecting on the points discussed, it’s evident that _____________ and _____________ share similarities such as _____________, while also demonstrating unique differences, particularly in _____________. The preference for one over the other would typically depend on factors such as _____________. Yet, regardless of their distinctions, both _____________ and _____________ play integral roles in their respective areas, significantly contributing to _____________.

Reflecting on the points discussed, it’s evident that red and orange share similarities such as the fact they are both ‘hot colors’, while also demonstrating unique differences, particularly in their social meaning (red meaning danger and orange warmth). The preference for one over the other would typically depend on factors such as personal taste. Yet, regardless of their distinctions, both red and orange play integral roles in their respective areas, significantly contributing to color theory.

Ultimately, the comparison and contrast of _____________ and _____________ have revealed intriguing similarities and notable differences. Differences such as _____________ give deeper insights into their unique and shared qualities. When it comes to choosing between them, _____________ will likely be a deciding factor. Despite these differences, it is important to remember that both _____________ and _____________ hold significant value within the context of _____________, and each contributes to _____________ in its own unique way.

Ultimately, the comparison and contrast of driving and flying have revealed intriguing similarities and notable differences. Differences such as their differing speed to destination give deeper insights into their unique and shared qualities. When it comes to choosing between them, urgency to arrive at the destination will likely be a deciding factor. Despite these differences, it is important to remember that both driving and flying hold significant value within the context of air transit, and each contributes to facilitating movement in its own unique way.

See Here for More Compare and Contrast Essay Examples

4. Critical Essay Conclusion

In conclusion, the analysis of _____________ has unveiled critical aspects related to _____________. While there are strengths in _____________, its limitations are equally telling. This critique provides a more informed perspective on _____________, revealing that there is much more beneath the surface. Moving forward, the understanding of _____________ should evolve, considering both its merits and flaws.

In conclusion, the analysis of flow theory has unveiled critical aspects related to motivation and focus. While there are strengths in achieving a flow state, its limitations are equally telling. This critique provides a more informed perspective on how humans achieve motivation, revealing that there is much more beneath the surface. Moving forward, the understanding of flow theory of motivation should evolve, considering both its merits and flaws.

To conclude, this critical examination of _____________ sheds light on its multi-dimensional nature. While _____________ presents notable advantages, it is not without its drawbacks. This in-depth critique offers a comprehensive understanding of _____________. Therefore, future engagements with _____________ should involve a balanced consideration of its strengths and weaknesses.

To conclude, this critical examination of postmodern art sheds light on its multi-dimensional nature. While postmodernism presents notable advantages, it is not without its drawbacks. This in-depth critique offers a comprehensive understanding of how it has contributed to the arts over the past 50 years. Therefore, future engagements with postmodern art should involve a balanced consideration of its strengths and weaknesses.

Upon reflection, the critique of _____________ uncovers profound insights into its underlying intricacies. Despite its positive aspects such as ________, it’s impossible to overlook its shortcomings. This analysis provides a nuanced understanding of _____________, highlighting the necessity for a balanced approach in future interactions. Indeed, both the strengths and weaknesses of _____________ should be taken into account when considering ____________.

Upon reflection, the critique of marxism uncovers profound insights into its underlying intricacies. Despite its positive aspects such as its ability to critique exploitation of labor, it’s impossible to overlook its shortcomings. This analysis provides a nuanced understanding of marxism’s harmful effects when used as an economic theory, highlighting the necessity for a balanced approach in future interactions. Indeed, both the strengths and weaknesses of marxism should be taken into account when considering the use of its ideas in real life.

Ultimately, this critique of _____________ offers a detailed look into its advantages and disadvantages. The strengths of _____________ such as __________ are significant, yet its limitations such as _________ are not insignificant. This balanced analysis not only offers a deeper understanding of _____________ but also underscores the importance of critical evaluation. Hence, it’s crucial that future discussions around _____________ continue to embrace this balanced approach.

Ultimately, this critique of artificial intelligence offers a detailed look into its advantages and disadvantages. The strengths of artificial intelligence, such as its ability to improve productivity are significant, yet its limitations such as the possibility of mass job losses are not insignificant. This balanced analysis not only offers a deeper understanding of artificial intelligence but also underscores the importance of critical evaluation. Hence, it’s crucial that future discussions around the regulation of artificial intelligence continue to embrace this balanced approach.

This article promised 17 essay conclusions, and this one you are reading now is the twenty-first. This last conclusion demonstrates that the very best essay conclusions are written uniquely, from scratch, in order to perfectly cater the conclusion to the topic. A good conclusion will tie together all the key points you made in your essay and forcefully drive home the importance or relevance of your argument, thesis statement, or simply your topic so the reader is left with one strong final point to ponder.

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How to Conclude an Essay (with Examples)

Last Updated: July 22, 2024 Fact Checked

Writing a Strong Conclusion

What to avoid, brainstorming tricks.

This article was co-authored by Jake Adams and by wikiHow staff writer, Aly Rusciano . Jake Adams is an academic tutor and the owner of Simplifi EDU, a Santa Monica, California based online tutoring business offering learning resources and online tutors for academic subjects K-College, SAT & ACT prep, and college admissions applications. With over 14 years of professional tutoring experience, Jake is dedicated to providing his clients the very best online tutoring experience and access to a network of excellent undergraduate and graduate-level tutors from top colleges all over the nation. Jake holds a BS in International Business and Marketing from Pepperdine University. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 3,223,278 times.

So, you’ve written an outstanding essay and couldn’t be more proud. But now you have to write the final paragraph. The conclusion simply summarizes what you’ve already written, right? Well, not exactly. Your essay’s conclusion should be a bit more finessed than that. Luckily, you’ve come to the perfect place to learn how to write a conclusion. We’ve put together this guide to fill you in on everything you should and shouldn’t do when ending an essay. Follow our advice, and you’ll have a stellar conclusion worthy of an A+ in no time.

Tips for Ending an Essay

Rephrase your thesis to include in your final paragraph to bring the essay full circle.
End your essay with a call to action, warning, or image to make your argument meaningful.
Keep your conclusion concise and to the point, so you don’t lose a reader’s attention.
Do your best to avoid adding new information to your conclusion and only emphasize points you’ve already made in your essay.

“All in all”
“Ultimately”
“Furthermore”
“As a consequence”
“As a result”

Step 2 Briefly summarize your essay’s main points.

Make sure to write your main points in a new and unique way to avoid repetition.

Step 3 Rework your thesis statement into the conclusion.

Let’s say this is your original thesis statement: “Allowing students to visit the library during lunch improves campus life and supports academic achievement.”
Restating your thesis for your conclusion could look like this: “Evidence shows students who have access to their school’s library during lunch check out more books and are more likely to complete their homework.”
The restated thesis has the same sentiment as the original while also summarizing other points of the essay.

“When you use plastic water bottles, you pollute the ocean. Switch to using a glass or metal water bottle instead. The planet and sea turtles will thank you.”
“The average person spends roughly 7 hours on their phone a day, so there’s no wonder cybersickness is plaguing all generations.”
“Imagine walking on the beach, except the soft sand is made up of cigarette butts. They burn your feet but keep washing in with the tide. If we don’t clean up the ocean, this will be our reality.”
“ Lost is not only a show that changed the course of television, but it’s also a reflection of humanity as a whole.”
“If action isn’t taken to end climate change today, the global temperature will dangerously rise from 4.5 to 8 °F (−15.3 to −13.3 °C) by 2100.”

Focus on your essay's most prevalent or important parts. What key points do you want readers to take away or remember about your essay?

For instance, instead of writing, “That’s why I think that Abraham Lincoln was the best American President,” write, “That’s why Abraham Lincoln was the best American President.”
There’s no room for ifs, ands, or buts—your opinion matters and doesn’t need to be apologized for!

For instance, words like “firstly,” “secondly,” and “thirdly” may be great transition statements for body paragraphs but are unnecessary in a conclusion.

For instance, say you began your essay with the idea that humanity’s small sense of sense stems from space’s vast size. Try returning to this idea in the conclusion by emphasizing that as human knowledge grows, space becomes smaller.

Step 4 Think about your essay’s argument in a broader “big picture” context.

For example, you could extend an essay on the television show Orange is the New Black by bringing up the culture of imprisonment in America.

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About This Article

To end an essay, start your conclusion with a phrase that makes it clear your essay is coming to a close, like "In summary," or "All things considered." Then, use a few sentences to briefly summarize the main points of your essay by rephrasing the topic sentences of your body paragraphs. Finally, end your conclusion with a call to action that encourages your readers to do something or learn more about your topic. In general, try to keep your conclusion between 5 and 7 sentences long. For more tips from our English co-author, like how to avoid common pitfalls when writing an essay conclusion, scroll down! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Good Conclusion Paragraph (+30 Examples)

A good conclusion paragraph is the lasting impression you want to leave with your reader.

Here is a quick summary of how to write a good conclusion paragraph:

Write a good conclusion paragraph by summarizing key points, restating your thesis, and providing a final thought or call to action. Ensure it wraps up your main ideas, reinforces your argument, and leaves the reader with something to ponder.

This ultimate guide will walk you through the steps to craft an effective conclusion, along with 30 examples to inspire you.

5 Steps for Writing a Good Conclusion Paragraph

Person typing on a laptop at sunset on a cliff -- How to Write a Good Conclusion Paragraph

Table of Contents

There are five main steps to writing a good conclusion.

Let’s go through each step

1. Understand the Purpose

The conclusion is your final opportunity to leave an impact.

It should tie together your main ideas, reinforce your message, and give the reader a sense of closure.

Wrap Up Your Main Ideas

The conclusion should succinctly wrap up the main points of your writing. Think of it as a summary that captures the essence of your arguments without going into detailed explanations.

This helps reinforce what you have discussed and ensures that the reader remembers the core message.

Reinforce Your Thesis

Your thesis statement is the foundation of your writing.

In the conclusion, restate it in a new way to reinforce your central argument. This reminds the reader of the purpose of your writing and underscores its significance.

Give a Sense of Closure

A good conclusion gives a sense of closure to the reader. It signals that the discussion has come to an end and that all points have been addressed. This helps the reader feel that the piece is complete and that their time was well-spent.

Leave the Reader with Something to Think About

The best conclusions go beyond merely summarizing the content.

They leave the reader with a final thought or reflection that stays with them. This could be a call to action, a prediction about the future, or a thought-provoking question that encourages further reflection on the topic.

2. Summarize Key Points

Briefly summarize the key points discussed in the body of your text.

Avoid introducing new information. This helps the reader recall the main ideas.

Brief Summary

The summary should be concise and to the point. Highlight the main ideas discussed in your writing without going into detailed explanations. This helps refresh the reader’s memory of your key points.

Avoid New Information

Introducing new information in the conclusion can confuse the reader. The conclusion is not the place to present new arguments or data. Stick to summarizing what has already been discussed.

Recall Main Ideas

Summarizing the key points helps the reader recall the main ideas of your writing. This reinforces the message and ensures that the reader takes away the most important information from your piece.

“In conclusion, adopting sustainable practices, reducing waste, and promoting renewable energy are essential steps towards a greener future.”

3. Restate the Thesis

Restate your thesis in a new way. This reinforces your argument without sounding repetitive.

Restate, Don’t Repeat

Restating the thesis means expressing it in a new way.

Avoid repeating it verbatim.

Instead, rephrase it to reinforce your argument and show that you have successfully argued your point throughout the piece.

Reinforce the Argument

Restating the thesis helps reinforce your central argument. It reminds the reader of the purpose of your writing and underscores its significance.

Provide Closure Restating the thesis in the conclusion gives a sense of closure.

It signals that the discussion has come full circle and that you have addressed your initial argument.

“By implementing these strategies, we can significantly reduce our carbon footprint and protect our planet for future generations.”

4. Provide a Final Thought

Offer a final thought or reflection to leave a lasting impression. This could be a call to action, a prediction, or a thought-provoking question.

Final Thought or Reflection

A final thought or reflection can leave a lasting impression on the reader.

It shows that you are not just summarizing your points but also offering a deeper insight or perspective.

Call to Action

A call to action encourages the reader to take the next step.

It motivates them to act based on the information or arguments presented in your writing.

Prediction or Question

A prediction about the future or a thought-provoking question can engage the reader and encourage further reflection. This leaves the reader with something to think about even after they have finished reading.

“As we move forward, it’s crucial to remember that every small effort counts. Together, we can make a difference.”

5. Use a Call to Action (if applicable)

If your piece is meant to persuade or encourage action, include a call to action. This motivates the reader to take the next step.

Motivate the Reader

A call to action motivates the reader to take the next step.

It encourages them to act based on the information or arguments presented in your writing.

Encourage Action

Including a call to action is especially important in persuasive writing. It encourages the reader to act on the information provided and make a change or take a specific action.

Provide Clear Steps

A good call to action provides clear steps for the reader to follow.

It should be specific and actionable, guiding the reader on what to do next.

“Join us in making a positive change. Start today by reducing your plastic use and spreading awareness about environmental conservation.”

Check out this video about how to write a good conclusion:

How to Write a Good Conclusion for an Essay

Writing a good conclusion for an essay involves summarizing your main points, restating your thesis, and providing a final thought or reflection.

Here’s how:

Summarize Main Points : Briefly recap the key points discussed in the body of your essay.
Restate Thesis : Paraphrase your thesis statement to reinforce your argument.
Final Thought : Offer a final insight, question, or call to action to leave a lasting impression.

This approach ensures your essay feels complete and leaves the reader with a clear understanding of your argument.

How to Write a Good Conclusion for an Argumentative Essay

A strong conclusion for an argumentative essay should not only summarize the main points and restate the thesis but also emphasize the importance of your argument.

Follow these steps:

Summarize Arguments : Briefly outline the main arguments presented.
Restate Thesis : Rephrase your thesis to highlight its significance.
Address Counterarguments : Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and reinforce why your argument is stronger.
Call to Action : Encourage the reader to take action or reconsider their position.

How to Write a Good Conclusion for a Research Paper

Crafting a good conclusion for a research paper involves summarizing your findings, discussing their implications, and suggesting future research.

Here’s a guide:

Summarize Findings : Recap the key results of your research.
Discuss Implications : Explain the significance of your findings and how they contribute to the field.
Restate Research Question : Reiterate the research question and how your findings address it.
Suggest Future Research : Propose areas for further investigation.

This format provides a comprehensive and thoughtful conclusion that underscores the importance of your research and its potential impact.

30 Examples of Good Conclusion Paragraphs

Let’s explore some good examples of good conclusions.

Example 1: Environmental Essay

“In conclusion, the preservation of our natural resources is not just a necessity but a responsibility we owe to future generations. By taking small steps today, we can ensure a healthier planet tomorrow.”

Example 2: Technology Article

“As we embrace the advancements in technology, it is vital to remain vigilant about privacy and security. Staying informed and proactive can help us navigate the digital landscape safely.”

Example 3: Health and Wellness Blog

“Ultimately, achieving a balanced lifestyle requires dedication and mindfulness. By prioritizing our well-being, we can lead healthier and more fulfilling lives.”

Example 4: Business Report

“In summary, the market analysis indicates a positive trend for our product. With strategic planning and execution, we can capitalize on these opportunities and drive growth.”

Example 5: Education Essay

“In the end, fostering a love for learning in students is the key to their success. By creating engaging and supportive educational environments, we can inspire the next generation of leaders.”

Example 6: Travel Blog

“To conclude, exploring new destinations enriches our lives and broadens our perspectives. Embrace the adventure and discover the beauty of our world.”

Example 7: Personal Development Article

“In the final analysis, personal growth is a lifelong journey. Embrace challenges, learn from experiences, and continue striving to become the best version of yourself.”

Example 8: Marketing Case Study

“In closing, the data clearly shows that targeted marketing strategies significantly improve customer engagement and sales. By refining our approach, we can achieve even greater success.”

Example 9: Historical Analysis

“In conclusion, the events of the past continue to shape our present and future. Understanding history is essential to making informed decisions and avoiding past mistakes.”

Example 10: Scientific Research Paper

“Ultimately, the findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the subject and open the door for further research. Continued exploration in this field is vital for advancing knowledge.”

Example 11: Political Commentary

“In the end, civic engagement is crucial for a functioning democracy. Stay informed, participate in discussions, and exercise your right to vote.”

Example 12: Fashion Blog

“To wrap up, fashion is a powerful form of self-expression. Embrace your unique style and let your wardrobe reflect your personality.”

Example 13: Food Blog

“In conclusion, cooking at home not only saves money but also allows you to experiment with flavors and ingredients. Start your culinary journey today and discover the joys of homemade meals.”

Example 14: Sports Article

“Ultimately, teamwork and perseverance are the foundations of success in sports. Keep pushing your limits and strive for excellence on and off the field.”

Example 15: Literature Analysis

“In summary, the themes explored in this novel resonate with readers and offer valuable insights into the human condition. Its timeless message continues to inspire and provoke thought.”

Example 16: Parenting Blog

“In the end, raising children requires patience, love, and commitment. Cherish the moments, and remember that every effort you make shapes their future.”

Example 17: Finance Article

“To conclude, financial planning is essential for securing your future. Start today by setting clear goals and creating a budget that aligns with your aspirations.”

Example 18: Career Advice Blog

“In conclusion, building a successful career takes time and dedication. Stay focused, seek opportunities for growth, and never stop learning.”

Example 19: Fitness Blog

“Ultimately, regular exercise and a balanced diet are key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Stay motivated, and remember that every step counts towards your fitness goals.”

Example 20: DIY Blog

“In summary, DIY projects are a rewarding way to personalize your space and learn new skills. Get creative and start your next project today.”

Example 21: Relationship Advice

“In the end, strong relationships are built on communication, trust, and mutual respect. Nurture your connections and strive for harmony in your interactions.”

Example 22: Pet Care Blog

“To wrap up, responsible pet ownership involves understanding your pet’s needs and providing them with a loving home. Invest in their well-being, and they’ll reward you with unconditional love.”

Example 23: Environmental Science Paper

“In conclusion, addressing climate change requires global cooperation and immediate action. Every effort counts, and together we can create a sustainable future.”

Example 24: Technology Review

“Ultimately, this gadget offers impressive features that enhance convenience and efficiency. Consider it for your next tech upgrade.”

Example 25: Psychology Article

“In summary, understanding human behavior is crucial for improving mental health and well-being. Continue exploring this fascinating field for more insights.”

Example 26: Gardening Blog

“In the end, gardening is a therapeutic and rewarding hobby that connects us with nature. Start your garden today and enjoy the benefits of fresh produce and beautiful blooms.”

Example 27: Home Improvement Article

“To conclude, home improvement projects can significantly enhance your living space and increase property value. Plan carefully and enjoy the transformation.”

Example 28: Social Media Marketing

“In conclusion, effective social media marketing requires consistency, creativity, and engagement. Develop a strategy that resonates with your audience and watch your brand grow.”

Example 29: Automotive Review

“Ultimately, this vehicle combines performance, style, and safety. Take it for a test drive and experience its capabilities firsthand.”

Example 30: Music Blog

“In summary, music has the power to evoke emotions and bring people together. Explore different genres and find the soundtrack to your life.”

Tips for Writing a Strong Conclusion

Here are some simple but good tips for writing a powerful conclusion:

Keep it Concise – A good conclusion should be short and to the point. Avoid unnecessary details and focus on wrapping up your main ideas.
Use Clear Language – Ensure your language is clear and easy to understand. Avoid jargon and complex sentences.
Be Consistent – Maintain the same tone and style as the rest of your text. Consistency helps create a seamless reading experience.
End on a Positive Note – Whenever possible, end with a positive or uplifting message. This leaves the reader with a good impression.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

There are some common mistakes that many writers make when crafting their conclusions.

Introducing New Information – Don’t introduce new ideas or arguments in the conclusion. This can confuse the reader and dilute your main points.
Being Vague – Avoid vague statements that don’t add value. Be specific and clear in your summary.
Repetitiveness – Don’t repeat the same points over and over. Restate your thesis and key points in a new way.
Ignoring the Thesis – Make sure to tie your conclusion back to your thesis. This reinforces your argument and gives a sense of closure.

Final Thoughts: How to Write a Good Conclusion Paragraph

Writing a good conclusion paragraph is essential for creating a cohesive and impactful piece of writing.

By summarizing key points, restating the thesis, providing a final thought, and using a call to action, you can craft a strong conclusion that leaves a lasting impression.

Use the 30 examples provided to inspire your own writing and ensure your conclusions are always effective and engaging.

Highlight the “so what”

At the beginning of your paper, you explain to your readers what’s at stake—why they should care about the argument you’re making. In your conclusion, you can bring readers back to those stakes by reminding them why your argument is important in the first place. You can also draft a few sentences that put those stakes into a new or broader context.

In the conclusion to her paper about ADHD and RS, Roser echoes the stakes she established in her introduction—that research into connections between ADHD and RS has led to contradictory results, raising questions about the “behavioral mediation hypothesis.”

She writes, “as with many other conditions, ADHD and RS share a delicately intertwined pattern of neurological similarities that is rooted in the innate biology of an individual’s mind, a connection that cannot be explained in full by the behavioral mediation hypothesis.”

Leave your readers with the “now what”

After the “what” and the “so what,” you should leave your reader with some final thoughts. If you have written a strong introduction, your readers will know why you have been arguing what you have been arguing—and why they should care. And if you’ve made a good case for your thesis, then your readers should be in a position to see things in a new way, understand new questions, or be ready for something that they weren’t ready for before they read your paper.

In her conclusion, Roser offers two “now what” statements. First, she explains that it is important to recognize that the flawed behavioral mediation hypothesis “seems to place a degree of fault on the individual. It implies that individuals with ADHD must have elicited such frequent or intense rejection by virtue of their inadequate social skills, erasing the possibility that they may simply possess a natural sensitivity to emotion.” She then highlights the broader implications for treatment of people with ADHD, noting that recognizing the actual connection between rejection sensitivity and ADHD “has profound implications for understanding how individuals with ADHD might best be treated in educational settings, by counselors, family, peers, or even society as a whole.”

To find your own “now what” for your essay’s conclusion, try asking yourself these questions:

What can my readers now understand, see in a new light, or grapple with that they would not have understood in the same way before reading my paper? Are we a step closer to understanding a larger phenomenon or to understanding why what was at stake is so important?
What questions can I now raise that would not have made sense at the beginning of my paper? Questions for further research? Other ways that this topic could be approached?
Are there other applications for my research? Could my questions be asked about different data in a different context? Could I use my methods to answer a different question?
What action should be taken in light of this argument? What action do I predict will be taken or could lead to a solution?
What larger context might my argument be a part of?

What to avoid in your conclusion

a complete restatement of all that you have said in your paper.
a substantial counterargument that you do not have space to refute; you should introduce counterarguments before your conclusion.
an apology for what you have not said. If you need to explain the scope of your paper, you should do this sooner—but don’t apologize for what you have not discussed in your paper.
fake transitions like “in conclusion” that are followed by sentences that aren’t actually conclusions. (“In conclusion, I have now demonstrated that my thesis is correct.”)
picture_as_pdf Conclusions

How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay

The conclusion is the final paragraph of your writing, and it holds significant weight. It allows you to leave a lasting impression on the reader. But how to write a conclusion that effectively summarizes your points and resonates with your audience?

This article will guide you through the process of crafting a strong conclusion paragraph, step by step. Our term paper writers will break down the key elements and provide clear examples to illustrate each point. By following these steps and referencing the examples, you'll be well on your way to writing impactful conclusions that leave your reader feeling satisfied and informed.

What Is a Conclusion

Conclusion in an essay is the final paragraph or section that wraps up the main points and provides closure to the piece.

Imagine it as the bridge that connects your ideas to a broader significance. A well-crafted conclusion does more than simply summarize; it elevates your points and offers a sense of closure, ensuring the reader leaves with a clear understanding of your argument's impact. In the next section, you will find conclusion ideas that you could use for your essay.

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How to Write a Conclusion

A powerful conclusion not only summarizes but also reinforces your message and leaves a lasting impression. Here's a breakdown of how to write a conclusion for an essay:

Restate Your Thesis: Briefly remind the reader of your central point. Don't simply copy and paste your thesis statement, but rephrase it using different words.
Summarize Key Points: Revisit the main arguments or evidence you presented throughout your writing. This reminds the reader of the journey you took them on and ensures they grasp the core takeaways.
Avoid Introducing New Information: The conclusion is not the place to introduce brand new ideas. Stick to summarizing and reinforcing the existing points.
End on a Strong Note: Go beyond a simple summary. You can add a final thought, pose a question to spark further reflection, or highlight the significance of your topic.

The Purpose of a Conclusion

As you already understand, the conclusion paragraph serves a critical function in your writing. It serves as a final push to solidify your message in your readers’ minds. It's also your opportunity to:

Remind the reader of your central point (thesis) and the key arguments or evidence used to support it.
Use this space to offer a final thought, pose a question that prompts further pondering, or emphasize the significance of your topic.

Remember, a concluding paragraph should NOT:

Introduce New Information: The conclusion is not the place for brand new ideas. Its purpose lies in wrapping up and reinforcing what you've already established.
Stray from the Thesis: Don't introduce arguments or evidence not discussed earlier in your writing. Maintain focus on the core message you've been building throughout your work.

How Long Should a Conclusion Paragraph Be

Generally, the ideal length depends on the overall length and complexity of your essay. However, it is not the sole factor. A well-written conclusion of 3 sentences can be far more effective than a rambling one that drags on for multiple paragraphs.

Here are some general guidelines can help you achieve a balance when writing a conclusion:

In most cases, you can effectively summarize your points and leave a lasting impression within 3-5 sentences.
Prioritize delivering a clear and impactful message over unnecessary elaboration.
Proportion matters. A lengthy research paper might warrant a slightly longer conclusion (think 5-7 sentences) to adequately address all the main points. Conversely, a shorter piece like a blog post might require a more concise conclusion (2-4 sentences).

Conclusion Transition Words

The right transition word can smoothly bridge the gap between your main body of text and your conclusion. Here are some transition words for conclusion categorized by their purpose:

Category 🔖	Phrases 💬
Summarizing 📝	In conclusion, To summarize, In essence, Overall, On the whole
Looking Ahead ⏩	As a result, Consequently, Therefore, Hence, Thus
Emphasizing Significance 🌟	More importantly, Even more so, It is crucial to remember that, Undoubtedly
Offering a Final Thought 🧐	In closing, Finally, To conclude, Ultimately
Shifting to a Call to Action 📣	For this reason, With this in mind, Let us now consider, In light of the above

7 Tips for Writing a Conclusion

Having grasped the core functions and structure of a conclusion paragraph, let's check out some practical tips to elevate your closing statements. Here are 7 effective strategies to consider from our dissertation writer :

Vary Your Sentence Structure: Avoid a monotonous string of simple sentences. Use a mix of sentence structures (short, long, complex) to create a more engaging rhythm.
Connect to the Introduction: For a cohesive feel, subtly tie your conclusion back to your introduction. You can reference an opening question you posed or revisit a key image you mentioned. Consider this tip especially when unsure how to start a conclusion.
Embrace Figurative Language (Sparingly): There are different conclusion ideas but a well-placed metaphor or simile can help leave a lasting impression. However, use figurative language strategically and avoid clichés.
Appeal to the Reader's Emotions: Did your writing highlight a pressing issue? Consider evoking emotions relevant to your topic when you want to know how to write a conclusion paragraph that tugs at the reader's heartstrings.
Consider a Quote (if Relevant): A powerful quote from a credible source can add authority and depth to your essay conclusion. Ensure the quote aligns with your thesis and enhances your message.
End with a Strong Call to Action (Optional): If your purpose is to persuade or inspire action, conclude with a clear call to action. Tell your reader exactly what you want them to do next.
Proofread and Revise: Just like any other part of your writing, proofread your conclusion carefully. Ensure clarity and a smooth flow between your main body of text and the closing statement.

By this time, you already know how to write a conclusion for an essay. However, if you still need further guidance, buy essay from our expert writers anytime!

Do’s and Don’ts of Essay Conclusion

Let's now look at some simple tips from our online paper writing service to help you avoid common mistakes when writing a conclusion.

Dos ✅	Don'ts ❌
Remind reader of main idea	Don't retell everything
Briefly touch on main arguments or evidence.	Don't bring up new ideas
Offer a final thought, question, or highlight the topic's importance.	Don't go off on tangents
Tailor your conclusion to resonate with your reader.	Don't use tired phrases. Be original, avoid clichés.
Leave a lasting impression with a powerful statement, question, or call to action (if needed).	Don't end abruptly

Conclusion Paragraph Examples

Here are three conclusion paragraph examples showcasing how powerful closings are crafted.

Recommended for reading: Nursing essay examples .

In closing, a strong conclusion is a must-have for any piece of writing. It reminds your reader of your main point and leaves them with a lasting impression. Here are some key things to reflect on how to write a good conclusion:

Restate your thesis in a fresh way.
Mention your key arguments.
Leave a lasting thought or question.
Consider your audience and tailor your ending to them.
End with a strong statement.

Remember, a good conclusion is not merely about wrapping things up but rather about making your writing truly impactful.

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How To Write A Conclusion For An Essay?

How to write a good conclusion, how to write a conclusion for a college essay.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Updated writing tips.
Added informative tables.
Added conclusion example.
Added an article conclusion.
Essay Conclusions | UMGC. (n.d.). University of Maryland Global Campus. https://www.umgc.edu/current-students/learning-resources/writing-center/writing-resources/writing/essay-conclusions
How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay | BestColleges. (n.d.). BestColleges.com. https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/how-to-write-a-conclusion/
Ending the Essay: Conclusions | Harvard College Writing Center. (n.d.). https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/ending-essay-conclusions

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Condensing a 1,000-plus-word essay into a neat little bundle may seem like a Herculean task. You must summarize all your findings and justify their importance within a single paragraph.

But, when you discover the formula for writing a conclusion paragraph, things get much simpler!

But, how to write a conclusion paragraph for an essay, and more importantly, how to make it impactful enough? Through this article, we will walk you through the process of constructing a powerful conclusion that leaves a lingering impression on readers’ minds. We will also acquaint you with essay conclusion examples for different types of essays.

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Let’s start from the beginning: How can you write a conclusion for an essay?

How to write a conclusion for an essay

In order to write an effective conclusion, you must first understand what is a conclusion in an essay. It is not just the summary of the main points of your essay. A well-written conclusion effectively ties together the main ideas of your essay and also pays heed to their broader implications. The objectives of your concluding paragraph are as follows:

Highlight the significance of your essay topic
Tie together the key points of your essay
Leave the reader with something to ponder about

A good essay conclusion begins with a modified thesis statement that is altered on the basis of the information stated throughout the essay. It then ties together all the main points of the essay and ends with a clincher that highlights the broader implications of your thesis statement.

Now that we’ve understood the basics of how to conclude an essay, let’s understand the key aspects of a good conclusion paragraph.

1. Restating your thesis statement

If you want to understand how to start a conclusion, you must realize that involves more than just restating the thesis statement word for word. Your thesis statement needs to be updated and expanded upon as per the information provided in your essay.

There are many ways to start a conclusion. One such method could be to start with the revised version of your thesis statement that hints to the significance of your argument. After this, your conclusion paragraph can organically move on to your arguments in the essay.

Let’s take a look at an effective way of writing a conclusion for an essay:

If the following claim is your thesis statement:

Virtual reality (VR) is undeniably altering the perception of reality by revolutionizing various industries, reshaping human experiences, and challenging traditional notions of what is real.

The restated thesis statement will be as follows:

Our analysis has substantiated the claim that virtual reality (VR) is significantly transforming the way we perceive reality. It has revolutionized industries, reshaped human experiences, and challenged traditional notions of reality.

2. Tying together the main points

Tying together all the main points of your essay does not mean simply summarizing them in an arbitrary manner. The key is to link each of your main essay points in a coherent structure. One point should follow the other in a logical format.

The goal is to establish how each of these points connects to the message of your essay as a whole. You can also take the help of powerful quotes or impactful reviews to shed a unique light on your essay.

Let’s take a look at an example:

VR presents a new paradigm where the distinction between the real and the virtual becomes increasingly blurred. As users dive into immersive virtual worlds, they are confronted with questions about the nature of reality, perception, and the boundaries of human consciousness.

3. Constructing an impactful conclusion

Most of us are confused about how to end an essay with a bang. The answer is quite simple! The final line of your essay should be impactful enough to create a lasting impression on the reader. More importantly, it should also highlight the significance of your essay topic. This could mean the broader implications of your topic, either in your field of study or in general.

Optionally, you could also try to end your essay on an optimistic note that motivates or encourages the reader. If your essay is about eradicating a problem in society, highlight the positive effects achieved by the eradication of that problem.

Here’s an example of how to end an essay:

In a world where virtual boundaries dissolve, VR is the catalyst that reshapes our perception of reality, forever altering the landscape of the human experience.

Here’s a combined version of all three aspects:

Our analysis has substantiated the claim that Virtual Reality (VR) is significantly transforming how we perceive reality. It has revolutionized industries, reshaped human experiences, and challenged traditional notions of reality. It presents a new paradigm where the distinction between the real and the virtual becomes increasingly blurred. As users dive into immersive virtual worlds, they are confronted with questions about the nature of reality, perception, and the boundaries of human consciousness. In a world where virtual boundaries dissolve, it is the catalyst that reshapes our perception of reality, forever altering the landscape of the human experience.

Now that we’ve understood the structure of a concluding paragraph, let’s look at what to avoid while writing a conclusion.

What to avoid in your conclusion paragraph

When learning how to write a conclusion for an essay, you must also know what to avoid. You want to strengthen your argument with the help of a compelling conclusion paragraph, and not undermine it by confusing the reader.

Let’s take a look at a few strategies to avoid in your essay conclusion:

1. Avoid including new evidence

The conclusion should not introduce new information but rather strengthen the arguments that are already made. If you come across any unique piece of information regarding your essay topic, accommodate it into your body paragraphs rather than stuffing it into your conclusion.

Including new, contradictory information in the concluding paragraph not only confuses the reader but also weakens your argument. You may include a powerful quote that strengthens the message of your essay, or an example that sheds light on the importance of your argument. However, this does not include introducing a completely new argument or making a unique point.

2. Avoid the use of concluding phrases

Your conclusion should hint towards your essay coming to an end, instead of blatantly stating the obvious. Blatant concluding statements undermine the quality of your essay, making it clumsy and amateurish. They also significantly diminish the quality of your arguments.

It is a good idea to avoid the following statements while concluding your essay:

In conclusion,
In summary,

While using these statements may not be incorrect per se, hinting towards a conclusion creates a better impression on the reader rather than blatantly stating it.

Here are more effective statements you could use:

Let this essay serve as a catalyst for…
As we navigate the intricacies of this multifaceted topic, remember…
As I bid farewell to this subject…

3. Don’t undermine your argument

Although there might be several points of view regarding your essay topic, it is crucial that you stick to your own. You may have stated and refuted other points of view in your body paragraphs.

However, your conclusion is simply meant to strengthen your main argument. Mentioning other points of view in your essay conclusion, not only weakens your argument but also creates a poor impression of your essay.

Here are a few phrases you should avoid in your essay conclusion:

There are several methods to approach this topic.
There are plenty of good points for both sides of the argument.
There is no clear solution to this problem.

Examples of essay conclusions

Different types of essays make use of different forms of conclusions. The critical question of “how to start a conclusion paragraph” has many different answers. To help you further, we’ve provided a few good conclusions for essays that are based on the four main essay types.

1. Narrative essay conclusion

The following essay conclusion example elaborates on the narrator’s unique experience with homeschooling.

Restated thesis statement
Body paragraph summary
Closing statement

My experience with homeschooling has been a journey that has shaped me in profound ways. Through the challenges and triumphs, I have come to appreciate the unique advantages and personal growth that homeschooling can offer. As I reflect on my journey, I am reminded of the transformative power of this alternative education approach. It has empowered me to take ownership of my education, nurture my passions, and develop skills that extend far beyond the confines of academic achievement. Whether in traditional classrooms or homeschooling environments, it is through embracing and nurturing the unique potential within each of us that we can truly thrive and make a lasting impact on the world.

2. Descriptive essay conclusion

The following essay conclusion example elaborates on the narrator’s bond with their cat.

The enchanting presence that my cat has cannot be ignored, captivating my heart with her grace, charm, and unconditional love. Through the moments of playfulness, companionship, and affection, she has become an irreplaceable member of my family. As I continue to cherish the memories and lessons learned from her, I am reminded of the extraordinary power of the human-animal bond. In their company, we find solace, companionship, and a love that transcends words. In a world that can be challenging and tumultuous, never underestimate the profound impact that animals can have on our lives. In their presence, not only do we find love but also a profound sense of connection.

3. Argumentative essay conclusion

Here’s an essay conclusion example that elaborates on the marginalization of, and acute intolerance towards, LGBTQ+ individuals.

The journey toward equality for LGBTQ+ individuals is an ongoing battle that demands our unwavering commitment to justice and inclusion. It is evident that while progress has been made, the journey toward equality for these individuals is far from complete. It demands our continued advocacy, activism, and support for legislative change, societal acceptance, and the creation of inclusive environments. The struggle for LGBTQ+ equality is a fight for the very essence of human dignity and the recognition of our shared humanity. It is a battle that requires our collective efforts, determination, and an unyielding belief in the fundamental principles of equality and justice.

4. Expository essay conclusion

This example of an essay conclusion revolves around a psychological phenomenon named the bandwagon effect and examines its potential ill effects on society:

The bandwagon effect in psychology is a fascinating phenomenon that sheds light on the powerful influence of social conformity on individual behavior and decision-making processes. This effect serves as a reminder of the inherently social nature of human beings and the power of social influence in shaping our thoughts, attitudes, and actions. It underscores the importance of critical thinking, individual autonomy, and the ability to resist the pressure of conformity. By understanding its mechanisms and implications, we can guard against its potential pitfalls and actively foster independent thought and decision-making, also contributing to a more enlightened and progressive society.

Now that you’ve taken a closer look at different conclusions for essays, it’s time to put this knowledge to good use. If you need to take your essay up a notch and score high, professional essay editing services are your best bet.

Happy writing!

Frequently Asked Questions

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Writing Tips

How to Write an Essay Conclusion

4-minute read

1st October 2022

Regardless of what you’re studying, writing essays is probably a significant part of your work as a student . Taking the time to understand how to write each section of an essay (i.e., introduction, body, and conclusion) can make the entire process easier and ensure that you’ll be successful.

Once you’ve put in the hard work of writing a coherent and compelling essay, it can be tempting to quickly throw together a conclusion without the same attention to detail. However, you won’t leave an impactful final impression on your readers without a strong conclusion.

We’ve compiled a few easy steps to help you write a great conclusion for your next essay . Watch our video, or check out our guide below to learn more!

1. Return to Your Thesis

Similar to how an introduction should capture your reader’s interest and present your argument, a conclusion should show why your argument matters and leave the reader with further curiosity about the topic.

To do this, you should begin by reminding the reader of your thesis statement. While you can use similar language and keywords when referring to your thesis, avoid copying it from the introduction and pasting it into your conclusion.

Try varying your vocabulary and sentence structure and presenting your thesis in a way that demonstrates how your argument has evolved throughout your essay.

2. Review Your Main Points

In addition to revisiting your thesis statement, you should review the main points you presented in your essay to support your argument.

However, a conclusion isn’t simply a summary of your essay . Rather, you should further examine your main points and demonstrate how each is connected.

Try to discuss these points concisely, in just a few sentences, in preparation for demonstrating how they fit in to the bigger picture of the topic.

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3. Show the Significance of Your Essay

Next, it’s time to think about the topic of your essay beyond the scope of your argument. It’s helpful to keep the question “so what?” in mind when you’re doing this. The goal is to demonstrate why your argument matters.

If you need some ideas about what to discuss to show the significance of your essay, consider the following:

What do your findings contribute to the current understanding of the topic?
Did your findings raise new questions that would benefit from future research?
Can you offer practical suggestions for future research or make predictions about the future of the field/topic?
Are there other contexts, topics, or a broader debate that your ideas can be applied to?

While writing your essay, it can be helpful to keep a list of ideas or insights that you develop about the implications of your work so that you can refer back to it when you write the conclusion.

Making these kinds of connections will leave a memorable impression on the reader and inspire their interest in the topic you’ve written about.

4. Avoid Some Common Mistakes

To ensure you’ve written a strong conclusion that doesn’t leave your reader confused or lacking confidence in your work, avoid:

Presenting new evidence: Don’t introduce new information or a new argument, as it can distract from your main topic, confuse your reader, and suggest that your essay isn’t organized.
Undermining your argument: Don’t use statements such as “I’m not an expert,” “I feel,” or “I think,” as lacking confidence in your work will weaken your argument.
Using generic statements: Don’t use generic concluding statements such as “In summary,” “To sum up,” or “In conclusion,” which are redundant since the reader will be able to see that they’ve reached the end of your essay.

Finally, don’t make the mistake of forgetting to proofread your essay ! Mistakes can be difficult to catch in your own writing, but they can detract from your writing.

Our expert editors can ensure that your essay is clear, concise, and free of spelling and grammar errors. Find out more by submitting a free trial document today!

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The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Conclusions

What this handout is about.

This handout will explain the functions of conclusions, offer strategies for writing effective ones, help you evaluate conclusions you’ve drafted, and suggest approaches to avoid.

About conclusions

Introductions and conclusions can be difficult to write, but they’re worth investing time in. They can have a significant influence on a reader’s experience of your paper.

Just as your introduction acts as a bridge that transports your readers from their own lives into the “place” of your analysis, your conclusion can provide a bridge to help your readers make the transition back to their daily lives. Such a conclusion will help them see why all your analysis and information should matter to them after they put the paper down.

Your conclusion is your chance to have the last word on the subject. The conclusion allows you to have the final say on the issues you have raised in your paper, to synthesize your thoughts, to demonstrate the importance of your ideas, and to propel your reader to a new view of the subject. It is also your opportunity to make a good final impression and to end on a positive note.

Your conclusion can go beyond the confines of the assignment. The conclusion pushes beyond the boundaries of the prompt and allows you to consider broader issues, make new connections, and elaborate on the significance of your findings.

Your conclusion should make your readers glad they read your paper. Your conclusion gives your reader something to take away that will help them see things differently or appreciate your topic in personally relevant ways. It can suggest broader implications that will not only interest your reader, but also enrich your reader’s life in some way. It is your gift to the reader.

Strategies for writing an effective conclusion

One or more of the following strategies may help you write an effective conclusion:

Play the “So What” Game. If you’re stuck and feel like your conclusion isn’t saying anything new or interesting, ask a friend to read it with you. Whenever you make a statement from your conclusion, ask the friend to say, “So what?” or “Why should anybody care?” Then ponder that question and answer it. Here’s how it might go: You: Basically, I’m just saying that education was important to Douglass. Friend: So what? You: Well, it was important because it was a key to him feeling like a free and equal citizen. Friend: Why should anybody care? You: That’s important because plantation owners tried to keep slaves from being educated so that they could maintain control. When Douglass obtained an education, he undermined that control personally. You can also use this strategy on your own, asking yourself “So What?” as you develop your ideas or your draft.
Return to the theme or themes in the introduction. This strategy brings the reader full circle. For example, if you begin by describing a scenario, you can end with the same scenario as proof that your essay is helpful in creating a new understanding. You may also refer to the introductory paragraph by using key words or parallel concepts and images that you also used in the introduction.
Synthesize, don’t summarize. Include a brief summary of the paper’s main points, but don’t simply repeat things that were in your paper. Instead, show your reader how the points you made and the support and examples you used fit together. Pull it all together.
Include a provocative insight or quotation from the research or reading you did for your paper.
Propose a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study. This can redirect your reader’s thought process and help them to apply your info and ideas to their own life or to see the broader implications.
Point to broader implications. For example, if your paper examines the Greensboro sit-ins or another event in the Civil Rights Movement, you could point out its impact on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. A paper about the style of writer Virginia Woolf could point to her influence on other writers or on later feminists.

Strategies to avoid

Beginning with an unnecessary, overused phrase such as “in conclusion,” “in summary,” or “in closing.” Although these phrases can work in speeches, they come across as wooden and trite in writing.
Stating the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion.
Introducing a new idea or subtopic in your conclusion.
Ending with a rephrased thesis statement without any substantive changes.
Making sentimental, emotional appeals that are out of character with the rest of an analytical paper.
Including evidence (quotations, statistics, etc.) that should be in the body of the paper.

Four kinds of ineffective conclusions

The “That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It” Conclusion. This conclusion just restates the thesis and is usually painfully short. It does not push the ideas forward. People write this kind of conclusion when they can’t think of anything else to say. Example: In conclusion, Frederick Douglass was, as we have seen, a pioneer in American education, proving that education was a major force for social change with regard to slavery.
The “Sherlock Holmes” Conclusion. Sometimes writers will state the thesis for the very first time in the conclusion. You might be tempted to use this strategy if you don’t want to give everything away too early in your paper. You may think it would be more dramatic to keep the reader in the dark until the end and then “wow” them with your main idea, as in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reader, however, does not expect a mystery, but an analytical discussion of your topic in an academic style, with the main argument (thesis) stated up front. Example: (After a paper that lists numerous incidents from the book but never says what these incidents reveal about Douglass and his views on education): So, as the evidence above demonstrates, Douglass saw education as a way to undermine the slaveholders’ power and also an important step toward freedom.
The “America the Beautiful”/”I Am Woman”/”We Shall Overcome” Conclusion. This kind of conclusion usually draws on emotion to make its appeal, but while this emotion and even sentimentality may be very heartfelt, it is usually out of character with the rest of an analytical paper. A more sophisticated commentary, rather than emotional praise, would be a more fitting tribute to the topic. Example: Because of the efforts of fine Americans like Frederick Douglass, countless others have seen the shining beacon of light that is education. His example was a torch that lit the way for others. Frederick Douglass was truly an American hero.
The “Grab Bag” Conclusion. This kind of conclusion includes extra information that the writer found or thought of but couldn’t integrate into the main paper. You may find it hard to leave out details that you discovered after hours of research and thought, but adding random facts and bits of evidence at the end of an otherwise-well-organized essay can just create confusion. Example: In addition to being an educational pioneer, Frederick Douglass provides an interesting case study for masculinity in the American South. He also offers historians an interesting glimpse into slave resistance when he confronts Covey, the overseer. His relationships with female relatives reveal the importance of family in the slave community.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Douglass, Frederick. 1995. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: Dover.

Hamilton College. n.d. “Conclusions.” Writing Center. Accessed June 14, 2019. https://www.hamilton.edu//academics/centers/writing/writing-resources/conclusions .

Holewa, Randa. 2004. “Strategies for Writing a Conclusion.” LEO: Literacy Education Online. Last updated February 19, 2004. https://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/conclude.html.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Make Your Essay Structure Rock-Solid with These Tips

So you’ve been assigned an essay. Or, probably more realistically, two, three, or four essays . . . and they’re all due the same week.

We’ve all been there: overwhelmed, staring down that blank screen, and not sure which essay to start with or how to get it started.

In high school and college, it’s not enough to just write strong essays. One of the most important skills to develop is writing strong essays efficiently . And the foundation of that skill is knowing how to structure an essay. With a template for the basic essay structure in hand, you can focus on what really matters when you’re writing essays: your arguments and the evidence you’re using to support them. Take a look at the basic essay structure below and see how the parts of an essay work together to present a coherent, well-reasoned position, no matter what topic you’re writing about.

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Basic essay structure: the 3 main parts of an essay

Almost every single essay that’s ever been written follows the same basic structure:

Introduction

Body paragraphs.

This structure has stood the test of time for one simple reason: It works. It clearly presents the writer’s position, supports that position with relevant examples, and neatly ties their supporting arguments together in a way that makes their position evident.

It all starts here. This is where you introduce the topic you’re discussing in your essay and briefly summarize the points you’ll make in the paragraphs that follow.

This is also where you state your thesis. Your thesis is the most important part of your essay because it’s the point you’re making . It needs to take a clear stance and shouldn’t include hedging language that undermines that stance like “seems to” or “possibly could.”

Here are a few examples of thesis statements:

In the final scene of The Awakening , Edna Pontellier’s decision demonstrates that it was impossible for her to have the lifestyle she truly wanted in the society in which she lived.
Due to its volatility and lack of government regulation, Bitcoin cannot become a viable currency for everyday purchases.
While the habitability of Mars has not yet been proven, evidence suggests that it was once possible due to bacteria samples found on the Red Planet.

An easy way to write your thesis statement is to think of it as a summary of your essay. Your thesis makes and supports your essay’s point in one concise sentence.

When you proofread your finished essay, make sure your thesis is clearly stated in your introduction paragraph. If it’s not clear, go back and write a definitive thesis statement.

>>Read More: How to Write a Persuasive Essay

Your essay’s body paragraphs are where you support your thesis statement with facts and evidence. Each body paragraph should focus on one supporting argument for your thesis by discussing related data, content, or events.

If you’re not sure whether you should include a specific point or detail in your body paragraphs, refer back to your thesis statement. If the detail supports your thesis, it should be in your essay. If it doesn’t, leave it out. Your thesis statement is the core of your basic essay structure, so everything else in the essay needs to relate to it in some way.

In your essay’s conclusion paragraph , you summarize the points you made and bring your argument to its logical conclusion. Because your reader is now familiar with your thesis, the summary in your conclusion paragraph can be more direct and conclusive than the one in your intro paragraph.

>>Read More: 7 Writing Tips from Professors to Help you Crush your First Essays

How many paragraphs are in an essay?

There’s no hard-and-fast requirement for college essays. In high school, you were probably taught to write five-paragraph essays. This is a solid essay structure to work with, but in college, you generally have more flexibility with assignment lengths and formats.

Now, consider five the minimum—not the standard—number of paragraphs you should include in your essays.

Essay structure examples

There are a few different ways to present information in an essay. Often, your assignment will tell you what kind of essay to write, such as a chronological, compare and contrast, or problems-methods-solution essay. If you’re not sure which is best for your assignment, ask your instructor.

Chronological

A chronological essay guides the reader through a series of events. This essay structure is ideal if you’re writing about:

A current or historical event
A book or article you read for class
A process or procedure

With this kind of essay, you first introduce your topic and summarize the series of events in your introduction paragraph. Then, each body paragraph takes the reader through a key stage in that series, which might be a decisive battle in history, a pivotal scene in a novel, or a critical stage in a judicial process. In your conclusion, you present the end result of the series you discussed, underscoring your thesis with this result.

Compare and contrast

A compare-and-contrast essay has a structure that discusses multiple subjects, like several novels, concepts, or essays you’ve been assigned to read.

There are a few different ways to structure a compare-and-contrast essay. The most obvious is to spend one paragraph discussing the similarities between the topics you’re covering (comparing), then one paragraph detailing their differences (contrasting), followed by a paragraph that explores whether they’re more alike or more different from each other.

Another method is to only compare, where each of your body paragraphs discusses a similarity between the topics at hand. Or you can go the only-contrast route, where your body paragraphs explore the differences. Whichever you decide on, make sure each paragraph is focused on one topic sentence . Every new comparison or contrast should occupy its own paragraph.

Problems-methods-solution

As its name implies, this kind of essay structure presents the writer’s position in three segments:

Ways to resolve the problem
The solution achieved by using these strategies to resolve the problem

This kind of essay works great if you’re discussing methods for resolving a problem, like knowing how to distinguish between credible and non-credible sources when you’re doing research for assignments. It can also work when you’re tasked with explaining why certain solutions haven’t worked to fix the problems they were created for.

With this kind of essay, begin by introducing the problem at hand. In the subsequent body paragraphs, cover possible methods for resolving the problem, discussing how each is suited to fixing the problem, and potential challenges that can arise with each. You can certainly state which you think is the best choice—that could even be your thesis statement. In your conclusion paragraph, summarize the problem again and the desired resolution, endorsing your method of choice (if you have one).

In this kind of essay, you can also include a call to action in your final paragraph. A call to action is a direct order for the reader to take a specific action, like “call your congressperson today and tell them to vote no” or “visit grammarly.com today to add Grammarly browser extension for free.”

>>Read More: How to Write Better Essays: 5 Concepts you Must Master

With the basic essay structure down, you can get to writing

For a lot of students, getting started is the hardest part of writing an essay. Knowing how to structure an essay can get you past this seemingly insurmountable first step because it gives you a clear skeleton upon which to flesh out your thoughts. With that step conquered, you’re on your way to crushing your assignment.

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Essay Structure: How to Write a Conclusion | Essay Writing Part 5

guide-english-part-5-how-to-write-a-conclusion-hero

Guide Chapters

1. Thesis statement
2. Introduction structure
3. Topic sentence
4. Body paragraph structure
5. Conclusion

This post, How to Write a Conclusion, is part 4 in our Essay Writing Series.

Some common questions students have about essay structure are:

How do I develop strong essay structure?
Are conclusions important for essay structure?
Can a conclusion be too long or too short?
What should a conclusion include?
How do I write a good conclusion?

In this post we’ll discuss the theory behind essay structure and show you why conclusions, are essential. We will then give you a step-by-guide for writing a Band 6 conclusion for your killer essay!

1. Essential Essay Structure 2. Sustained Arguments and Conclusions 3. Recapping Essay Structure 4. Structuring Your Conclusion 5. How to Write a Conclusion – A Step-by-Step Guide

If you are unsure how to write an introduction or topic sentences, then you should read the previous posts in the series:

Introduction Structure: How to Write a Thesis Statement | Essay Writing Part 1
Introduction Structure: How to Write a Thematic Framework | Essay Writing Part 2
Paragraph Structure: How to Write a Topic Sentence | Essay Writing Part 3
Paragraph Structure: How to Write a Body Paragraph | Essay Writing Part 4

These posts give you step-by-step advice for writing well structured essays that will score you Band 6. They will provide the foundations of essay structure that we will conclude (pun intended!) in this post.

Now, let’s discuss how to develop a conclusion that sustains your argument and concludes it effectively and memorably before walking through an easy step-by-step process for writing fabulous conclusions.

Let’s go!

Essential essay structure: How to write a conclusion | Essay writing Part 5

Essay writing is not an innate skill, it is a craft that it is learned and refined through practice and dedication. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, writing is something you need to work at to perfect. Writing good conclusions takes practice. But before you begin practising, you should learn how to write them effectively.

Let’s see how Matrix Students are taught how to write conclusions.

What is a conclusion?

A conclusion is the part of an essay that summarises your argument and recaps what has come before it.

A conclusion needs to do three things:

Restate the thesis : It needs to reassert you overarching argument, first;
Recap the key ideas : It needs to revisit the key ideas from the essay and touch on the logic for their inclusion or relevance.
Make a closing statement : It needs to include a statement that explains your final thought on the matter, a statement on what you have taken away from writing the essay, or perhaps provide an overall statement about studying the text or Module you have been engaging with.

Think about that.

A conclusion is a simple thing, but very important to your argument. So, you have to get it right!

Let’s discuss how to do that.

Conclusions, and sustained arguments – Thinking for the reader

A good speech or a good essay is essentially manipulative. It is crafted to convince your readers of a position or belief that you have. To do this effectively, you need to present information in an order and fashion that makes it digestible and logical.

You want to do the reader’s thinking for them!

This is a crucial part of readability that Matrix students learn. Writing that is readable presents the information the composer feels is relevant to an audience, and connects it together in a way that makes it seem unified and logical.

A good essay keeps a reader in it, rather than jarring them out of it. You don’t want a reader to stop reading and question your ideas while they are in the middle of the essay. This means that you have a logical flaw, or part of the structure and writing is convoluted in a manner that makes it difficult for your reader to follow your argument.

Remember, it’s fine for people to question your ideas and disagree with them, but you want to present your position in a clear and logical fashion first, so they have your whole perspective before critiquing it. A concise but comprehensive conclusion is essential for this.

A conclusion restates all the key parts of your argument to leave a complete picture in your reader’s mind.

So, your essay needs to be easy to read, and your conclusion has to sum things up for the reader so they can think about the broader picture you’ve argued. It is important that they do not struggle to remember the various parts of the argument.

Before we jump into writing conclusions, let’s recap the structure of an essay. This will help us focus on the logical role of the conclusion while we write it.

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Recapping essay structure

In the previous posts in this series we discussed how the key parts of the introduction and body work together to produce a sustained argument. Let’s see how that worked again to understand the role of the conclusion:

Blog-English-How-To-Write-A-Conclusion-Essay-Structure

As you can see, there are clear connections between the different parts of the essay.

The Thesis and Thematic Framework connect to the Topic Sentences and Linking Statements in the Body . But importantly, all of these structural elements are reasserted and connected in the conclusion.

The conclusion ties all of your ideas together.

By the time a reader reaches the conclusion, they may have forgotten key parts of your argument. The best way to reassert your ideas so they remain fresh in a reader’s mind when they finish reading your essay, is to use the logical structure of the introduction.

Let’s have a look at how to do that.

Structuring your conclusion

A conclusion needs to be structured to remind the audience what they have encountered, what the logic of it was, and then present them with a final, conclusive remark.

To do this effectively there are some important rules to follow:

Your conclusion needs to be at least 3 sentences – You’re summarising an argument, not making a point;
You must reassert your thesis in the first sentence – Make it clear what you have been arguing!
Don’t try and cram your themes into one sentence – You have presented a carefully structured argument that is logical and develops several complex ideas. It is often impossible to boil this down to one sentence, use two or, even, three if you need to be clear. Clarity is essential.
Don’t ramble – You must be concise. Even though you need to recap a significant amount of information, you need to be efficient. Aim to keep your conclusion shorter than your introduction.
Aim to keep your conclusion under 5 sentences – Your conclusion must be memorable. If it is too long, a reader will struggle to hold the essence of your essay in their minds as their final interaction with your argument.

Think about those points for a moment.

So, what does this mean for you when you write conclusions?

Let’s have a look.

Restate the thesis

The first part of the conclusion needs to reassert the key idea that you have argued. This means it needs to restate your thesis statement. But we don’t want to merely say the exact same thing we have already said. No. We want to paraphrase our central argument in an authoritative way.

To sound authoritative it is important to avoid low modality expressions. Low modality words reflect uncertainty – for example, “may,” “can,” might”. We need to make clear statements so we need high modality words – for example, “is”, “are”, “will.” Don’t say, “a reader might understand.” Say “the composer compels the audience to understand.”

Recap the themes

You need to restate your ideas in a logical manner. You don’t want to merely say “I have discussed theme 1, theme 2, and theme 3.” This doesn’t develop a sustained argument. If you say this, a reader will have to glance back to your introduction and body to remember your exact argument.

These are moments where you are taking the reader away from your argument. In those moments you just dropped two to three marks. That is a potential change from a Band 5 to a Band 6!

Instead, you want quickly recap your themes in a way that conveys the logic of your argument. Try saying “I discussed themes 1 and 2 because they support this part of my thesis. I looked at theme 3 because it supports a different way of looking at the same idea.” This structure allows you to maintain any of the nuance you have structured into your essay.

Make a final statement

You need to leave the reader with a powerful statement that encapsulates your argument. Don’t try and say something profound about the text.

Statements like “Thus, the human condition is innately volatile” don’t mean anything unless they are anchored in the text. They might sound insightful, and perhaps are in a broad way, but they don’t contribute to your reader’s understanding of your insights into the text and/or module.

Instead, try to make a statement that conveys your understanding of the key idea in your text and, if applicable, connect it to the module you’re studying. In light of this, your final statement should instead be “Hence this texts illustrates how difficult circumstances can make human experience volatile.”

This second statement does something that the first does not, it adds context and logic. It creates a sustained argument by doing the thinking for the reader.

Your final statement wants to leave your reader thinking because they are intrigued, not because they are trying to piece together your point!

Now that we have a rough idea of what a conclusion should do, and how it should do it. Let’s have a go at putting one together.

How to write a conclusion – A step-by-step guide

What we will do now is go through the step-by-step process of writing a conclusion. We will continue to look at Macbeth , so that we have a clear text to study. So to do this effectively, we need to quickly recap what the question was, and what our thesis and thematic framework were in response to it.

Revisiting the question

The question in the previous posts was:

“William Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not about revenge, it is a play concerned with morality and madness.”

To what extent do you agree with this statement? Make use of detailed references to the play in your response.

Revisiting our argument

To recap, our argument was that:

Macbeth is about morality
Macbeth goes mad with guilt
His fear of revenge, a convention of the play’s genre, is what leads to his madness.

Revisiting our thesis

In the previous posts, our thesis statement was:

“The resolution of The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606) is driven by revenge. However, it is Shakespeare’s interrogation of the morality of Macbeth’s actions and his subsequent descent into madness that is the central focus of the text.”

Revisiting our thematic framework

And, similarly, our thematic framework introduced the following thematic points:

“Macbeth’s madness is a response to his awareness of his immorality, it is driven by his fear of the revenge he feels he deserves.”
“Macbeth’s actions are immoral, killing a king is regicide and the murder of his friends demonstrate his increasing depravity.”
“As Macbeth’s madness emerges as he questions his morality and is plagued by visions and haunted by the spirits of his victims.”

Now we know what we’ve argued, let’s go through the step-by-step process for writing conclusions.

Step 1: Restate your thesis

The first step is reiterating our core argument. Our thesis was that, “The resolution of The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606) is driven by revenge. However, it is Shakespeare’s interrogation of the morality of Macbeth’s actions and his subsequent descent into madness that is the central focus of the text.” We need to restate that in an effective way to summarise what we have just argued.

So, we need to restate that:

Macbeth is Tragedy concerned with revenge and morality
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are driven by lust for power
They are stricken by guilt for the immoral way they gained power.

Matrix students learn how to paraphrase things concisely and directly. So let’s have a go at paraphrasing these 2 sentences into 1:

is a tragedy primarily focused on the consequences of guilt on those who discard their morality in the pursuit of power.”

This sentence is assertive and makes a clear and strong statement about what has been argued in the essay. We have made it more concise than the introduction’s thesis. This gives us more room to discuss the logic of our thematic framework.

What we need to do now is restate our thematic framework.

Step 2: Reassert your thematic framework

To reassert our thematic framework we need to revisit the logic of our argument first. Our argument structure was:

Macbeth is about morality;
Macbeth goes mad with guilt; and,

And in our introduction we broke this down into three separate sentences to show you how to write a thematic framework:

For our conclusion we want to demonstrate concision and erudition, so we will paraphrase this in a shorter more direct way. To do this we will wrap these ideas into two sentences. Let’s see what that looks like:

Matrix students are taught to take this logical approach to writing conclusions. This statement reasserts the framework we presented in our introduction, but streamlines it and presents it in a chronological and logical order.

Now we need to make a statement that summarises our position on the question and conveys our central idea about the text.

Step 3: Make a final statement that summarises your argument

Your final statement is very important. It is the last engagement that you have with your reader. You need to demonstrate your knowledge of the text, your understanding of the questions, and an insight into the module being studied.

We were analysing at this text through the lens of Module B: Critical Study of Literature . As you remember, Module B look at well known texts to see why they are considered important and whether or not they have lasting value.

For our argument we will consider the text’s lasting value for audiences.

Our concluding statement, then, needs to reference this idea of a text’s lasting value and connect it to the themes in the text. Macbeth is concerned with morality and guilt. So, we can argue that it is Macbeth ‘s depiction of morality and guilt that makes it relevant to modern audiences.

We also need to connect this to our restated thesis which was:

“Clearly, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a tragedy primarily focused on the consequences of guilt on those who discard their morality in the pursuit of power.”

Now, let’s have a look at the kind of concluding statement a Matrix student would be taught to write that connects all of these threads together:

‘s lasting relevance lies in its representation of the peril of discarding one’s humanity and morality for the pursuit of absolute power or wealth.”

The finished conclusion

To get a better sense of what we have argued, let’s have a look at how the finished conclusion looks:

is a tragedy primarily focused on the consequences of guilt on those who discard their morality in the pursuit of power. Macbeth’s act of regicide was driven by a desire for power, but his madness is caused by awareness of his guilt and expectation of revenge. The irony of Macbeth’s experience is that by discarding morality for power, he is haunted to the point of paranoia by his guilt. ‘s lasting relevance lies in its representation of the peril of discarding one’s humanity and morality for the pursuit of absolute power or wealth.

Now that we have finished writing our conclusion, what next?

Next you need to practice writing your essays! Remember to proofread and edit your essay after you have finished writing it. Never submit the first draft!

© Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au, 2023. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Learn about the elements of a successful essay conclusion.

The conclusion is a very important part of your essay. Although it is sometimes treated as a roundup of all of the bits that didn’t fit into the paper earlier, it deserves better treatment than that! It's the last thing the reader will see, so it tends to stick in the reader's memory. It's also a great place to remind the reader exactly why your topic is important. A conclusion is more than just "the last paragraph"—it's a working part of the paper. This is the place to push your reader to think about the consequences of your topic for the wider world or for the reader's own life!

A good conclusion should do a few things:

Restate your thesis

Synthesize or summarize your major points

Make the context of your argument clear

Restating Your Thesis

You've already spent time and energy crafting a solid thesis statement for your introduction, and if you've done your job right, your whole paper focuses on that thesis statement. That's why it's so important to address the thesis in your conclusion! Many writers choose to begin the conclusion by restating the thesis, but you can put your thesis into the conclusion anywhere—the first sentence of the paragraph, the last sentence, or in between. Here are a few tips for rephrasing your thesis:

Remind the reader that you've proven this thesis over the course of your paper. For example, if you're arguing that your readers should get their pets from animal shelters rather than pet stores, you might say, "If you were considering that puppy in the pet-shop window, remember that your purchase will support 'puppy mills' instead of rescuing a needy dog, and consider selecting your new friend at your local animal shelter." This example gives the reader not only the thesis of the paper, but a reminder of the most powerful point in the argument!

Revise the thesis statement so that it reflects the relationship you've developed with the reader during the paper. For example, if you've written a paper that targets parents of young children, you can find a way to phrase your thesis to capitalize on that—maybe by beginning your thesis statement with, "As a parent of a young child…"

Don’t repeat your thesis word for word—make sure that your new statement is an independent, fresh sentence!

Summary or Synthesis

This section of the conclusion might come before the thesis statement or after it. Your conclusion should remind the reader of what your paper actually says! The best conclusion will include a synthesis, not just a summary—instead of a mere list of your major points, the best conclusion will draw those points together and relate them to one another so that your reader can apply the information given in the essay. Here are a couple of ways to do that:

Give a list of the major arguments for your thesis (usually, these are the topic sentences of the parts of your essay).

Explain how these parts are connected. For example, in the animal-shelter essay, you might point out that adopting a shelter dog helps more animals because your adoption fee supports the shelter, which makes your choice more socially responsible.

One of the most important functions of the conclusion is to provide context for your argument. Your reader may finish your essay without a problem and understand your argument without understanding why that argument is important. Your introduction might point out the reason your topic matters, but your conclusion should also tackle this questions. Here are some strategies for making your reader see why the topic is important:

Tell the reader what you want him or her to do. Is your essay a call to action? If so, remind the reader of what he/she should do. If not, remember that asking the reader to think a certain way is an action in itself. (In the above examples, the essay asks the reader to adopt a shelter dog—a specific action.)

Explain why this topic is timely or important. For example, the animal-shelter essay might end with a statistic about the number of pets in shelters waiting for adoption.

Remind the readers of why the topic matters to them personally. For example, it doesn’t matter much if you believe in the mission of animal shelters, if you're not planning to get a dog; however, once you're looking for a dog, it is much more important. The conclusion of this essay might say, "Since you’re in the market for a dog, you have a major decision to make: where to get one." This will remind the reader that the argument is personally important!

Conclusion paragraphs

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Writing Center

Strategic enrollment management and student success, conclusions and why they matter, a guide to what they are, how they work, and how to master them, conclusions vs. introductions.

Similarly to introductions, conclusions exist to guide readers. While introductions guide readers into essays, conclusions guide readers out. These functions are equally important in the structure of an essay. A conclusion is a paragraph (or set of paragraphs) that comes at the very end of an essay and it must restate the thesis (say what the essay has argued) and summarize the argument.

Think about a conclusion from the reader's point of view as the end of a conversation

Hey! Don't hang up on me!

Sometimes it's hard to know what to say in a conclusion. after all, you've just written the essay, what else can possibly be left to say? A lot of writers feel this way. However, an essay without a conclusion is similar to hanging up the phone the instant after you've told your friend a great story - your friend is going to think about how rude you were rather than about your story. In a phone conversation, you've got to wrap things up and say goodbye, this is also true for an essay. Make sure to provide your reader with a summary.

A summary: Since good stories are complex and can't be learned by heart the first time, give your reader a device to help remember and master your story (your argument).
A sense of relevance: Help the reader understand the point of your story by explaining the relevance of it.

How conclusions work

What does it really mean to say that a conclusion resembles the end of a phone conversation?

All things come to an end. Of course, you can't keep talking on the phone forever; both you and your friend expect an end to your conversation. At the same time, a conversation is something produced by two people, meaning that its end must be agreed upon, and if you hang up without warning, then you've seized all control, which isn't friendly. Even though the conclusion of an essay may be just a repetition of ideas found elsewhere, a reader needs to be able to see that things are winding down.
An end means a last look. If you sound polite and cheerful in saying goodbye, your friend will be much more likely to recall the story you've told and to look forward to hearing from you in the future. Because the conclusion to an essay is a reader's last impression of a writer's work, the writer must maintain excellence up to the last sentence, not dash something off quickly or run out of steam.
A last look is a kind of legacy. While you probably wouldn't tell your friend a pointless story, or one with no relation to any shared experience, making the relevance clear helps your friend know how to think about your story. Similarly, an essay that leaves a reader with something to think about is an essay that is more likely to be judged favorably and even reread. Connecting the writing to the reader is central to succeeding in communicating the importance of your story.

Acing the conclusion

The strategies below can help you write a conclusion that leaves your reader satisfied and feeling like they've gotten closure on your ideas.

Remind and encapsulate

Remember that even though you are already familiar with your essay, your reader is not. Having a reader who wants to reread your work is great, but your reader shouldn't have to reread. Giving your reader a summary is similar to taking a snapshot of your whole essay. Looking at that snapshot reminds your reader of the main points that have come before. A snapshot is a lot easier to carry around than a thousand little details.

Acknowledge loose ends

Since issues are complex and often do not have a single, neat resolution, the topic of your essay doesn't need to either. What possible resolutions do you see for the issue you have presented? Is there even a resolution? In either case, say what you see. Don't present answers if you haven't found any. Just be honest.

Make connections

Show your reader the point of reading your essay. What did you learn from writing your essay? How might reading your essay be helpful to your reader? What does your essay contribute?

Don't get carried away

You don't have to revolutionize the world or say the absolute final world on an age-old debate. In fact, a grandiose conclusion may seem out of proportion in anything as short as an essay. Communicating an idea is enough.

Now let's apply these ideas to an example conclusion

The trend towards "good taste" in mass-market products draws into question the idea of good taste altogether (Thesis) . Many things symbolizing high class living are in danger of losing their status simply because they can now be purchased at any Home Depot or Ikea; (Summary 1: the first main point) however, critics call décor and furniture exports such as Pier 1 Imports and Pottery Barn "cheap" not for offering sophisticated designs at bargain prices, but for offering them to all, even to mail-order costumers (Summary 2: the second main point) . Worst of all, Martha Stewart is said to have reduced good taste to merely another brand name by creating a line of home wares for the suburban superstore K-Mart (Summary 3: the third main point) . The implication is that a fine object loses its fineness as it gains wider appreciation, that beauty and elegance are qualities conferred by the elite and that an object's glow vanishes once too many have touched it, In other words, the wealthy and influential are not content with wealth and influence, but must have a world all to themselves; when others enter this world, they come to destroy (Relevance 1: a synthesis of the main points that reveals their significance in a wider context) . Martha Stewart would have to disagree. Sconce lights might look out of place on a cattle ranch, but their popularity does not equate them with the neon signs that one sees in the windows of bars - quality is quality. If replacing the average household's melamine plates with porcelain makes some people insecure, then so be it (Relevance 2: a stance that applies to readers) .

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Writing a Paper: Conclusions

Writing a conclusion.

A conclusion is an important part of the paper; it provides closure for the reader while reminding the reader of the contents and importance of the paper. It accomplishes this by stepping back from the specifics in order to view the bigger picture of the document. In other words, it is reminding the reader of the main argument. For most course papers, it is usually one paragraph that simply and succinctly restates the main ideas and arguments, pulling everything together to help clarify the thesis of the paper. A conclusion does not introduce new ideas; instead, it should clarify the intent and importance of the paper. It can also suggest possible future research on the topic.

An Easy Checklist for Writing a Conclusion

It is important to remind the reader of the thesis of the paper so he is reminded of the argument and solutions you proposed.

Think of the main points as puzzle pieces, and the conclusion is where they all fit together to create a bigger picture. The reader should walk away with the bigger picture in mind.

Make sure that the paper places its findings in the context of real social change.

Make sure the reader has a distinct sense that the paper has come to an end. It is important to not leave the reader hanging. (You don’t want her to have flip-the-page syndrome, where the reader turns the page, expecting the paper to continue. The paper should naturally come to an end.)

No new ideas should be introduced in the conclusion. It is simply a review of the material that is already present in the paper. The only new idea would be the suggesting of a direction for future research.

Conclusion Example

As addressed in my analysis of recent research, the advantages of a later starting time for high school students significantly outweigh the disadvantages. A later starting time would allow teens more time to sleep--something that is important for their physical and mental health--and ultimately improve their academic performance and behavior. The added transportation costs that result from this change can be absorbed through energy savings. The beneficial effects on the students’ academic performance and behavior validate this decision, but its effect on student motivation is still unknown. I would encourage an in-depth look at the reactions of students to such a change. This sort of study would help determine the actual effects of a later start time on the time management and sleep habits of students.

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Research paper

Writing a Research Paper Conclusion | Step-by-Step Guide

Published on October 30, 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on April 13, 2023.

Restate the problem statement addressed in the paper
Summarize your overall arguments or findings
Suggest the key takeaways from your paper

The content of the conclusion varies depending on whether your paper presents the results of original empirical research or constructs an argument through engagement with sources .

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Step 1: restate the problem, step 2: sum up the paper, step 3: discuss the implications, research paper conclusion examples, frequently asked questions about research paper conclusions.

The first task of your conclusion is to remind the reader of your research problem . You will have discussed this problem in depth throughout the body, but now the point is to zoom back out from the details to the bigger picture.

While you are restating a problem you’ve already introduced, you should avoid phrasing it identically to how it appeared in the introduction . Ideally, you’ll find a novel way to circle back to the problem from the more detailed ideas discussed in the body.

For example, an argumentative paper advocating new measures to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture might restate its problem as follows:

Meanwhile, an empirical paper studying the relationship of Instagram use with body image issues might present its problem like this:

“In conclusion …”

Avoid starting your conclusion with phrases like “In conclusion” or “To conclude,” as this can come across as too obvious and make your writing seem unsophisticated. The content and placement of your conclusion should make its function clear without the need for additional signposting.

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Having zoomed back in on the problem, it’s time to summarize how the body of the paper went about addressing it, and what conclusions this approach led to.

Depending on the nature of your research paper, this might mean restating your thesis and arguments, or summarizing your overall findings.

Argumentative paper: Restate your thesis and arguments

In an argumentative paper, you will have presented a thesis statement in your introduction, expressing the overall claim your paper argues for. In the conclusion, you should restate the thesis and show how it has been developed through the body of the paper.

Briefly summarize the key arguments made in the body, showing how each of them contributes to proving your thesis. You may also mention any counterarguments you addressed, emphasizing why your thesis holds up against them, particularly if your argument is a controversial one.

Don’t go into the details of your evidence or present new ideas; focus on outlining in broad strokes the argument you have made.

Empirical paper: Summarize your findings

In an empirical paper, this is the time to summarize your key findings. Don’t go into great detail here (you will have presented your in-depth results and discussion already), but do clearly express the answers to the research questions you investigated.

Describe your main findings, even if they weren’t necessarily the ones you expected or hoped for, and explain the overall conclusion they led you to.

Having summed up your key arguments or findings, the conclusion ends by considering the broader implications of your research. This means expressing the key takeaways, practical or theoretical, from your paper—often in the form of a call for action or suggestions for future research.

Argumentative paper: Strong closing statement

An argumentative paper generally ends with a strong closing statement. In the case of a practical argument, make a call for action: What actions do you think should be taken by the people or organizations concerned in response to your argument?

If your topic is more theoretical and unsuitable for a call for action, your closing statement should express the significance of your argument—for example, in proposing a new understanding of a topic or laying the groundwork for future research.

Empirical paper: Future research directions

In a more empirical paper, you can close by either making recommendations for practice (for example, in clinical or policy papers), or suggesting directions for future research.

Whatever the scope of your own research, there will always be room for further investigation of related topics, and you’ll often discover new questions and problems during the research process .

Finish your paper on a forward-looking note by suggesting how you or other researchers might build on this topic in the future and address any limitations of the current paper.

Full examples of research paper conclusions are shown in the tabs below: one for an argumentative paper, the other for an empirical paper.

Argumentative paper
Empirical paper

While the role of cattle in climate change is by now common knowledge, countries like the Netherlands continually fail to confront this issue with the urgency it deserves. The evidence is clear: To create a truly futureproof agricultural sector, Dutch farmers must be incentivized to transition from livestock farming to sustainable vegetable farming. As well as dramatically lowering emissions, plant-based agriculture, if approached in the right way, can produce more food with less land, providing opportunities for nature regeneration areas that will themselves contribute to climate targets. Although this approach would have economic ramifications, from a long-term perspective, it would represent a significant step towards a more sustainable and resilient national economy. Transitioning to sustainable vegetable farming will make the Netherlands greener and healthier, setting an example for other European governments. Farmers, policymakers, and consumers must focus on the future, not just on their own short-term interests, and work to implement this transition now.

As social media becomes increasingly central to young people’s everyday lives, it is important to understand how different platforms affect their developing self-conception. By testing the effect of daily Instagram use among teenage girls, this study established that highly visual social media does indeed have a significant effect on body image concerns, with a strong correlation between the amount of time spent on the platform and participants’ self-reported dissatisfaction with their appearance. However, the strength of this effect was moderated by pre-test self-esteem ratings: Participants with higher self-esteem were less likely to experience an increase in body image concerns after using Instagram. This suggests that, while Instagram does impact body image, it is also important to consider the wider social and psychological context in which this usage occurs: Teenagers who are already predisposed to self-esteem issues may be at greater risk of experiencing negative effects. Future research into Instagram and other highly visual social media should focus on establishing a clearer picture of how self-esteem and related constructs influence young people’s experiences of these platforms. Furthermore, while this experiment measured Instagram usage in terms of time spent on the platform, observational studies are required to gain more insight into different patterns of usage—to investigate, for instance, whether active posting is associated with different effects than passive consumption of social media content.

If you’re unsure about the conclusion, it can be helpful to ask a friend or fellow student to read your conclusion and summarize the main takeaways.

Do they understand from your conclusion what your research was about?
Are they able to summarize the implications of your findings?
Can they answer your research question based on your conclusion?

You can also get an expert to proofread and feedback your paper with a paper editing service .

The conclusion of a research paper has several key elements you should make sure to include:

A restatement of the research problem
A summary of your key arguments and/or findings
A short discussion of the implications of your research

No, it’s not appropriate to present new arguments or evidence in the conclusion . While you might be tempted to save a striking argument for last, research papers follow a more formal structure than this.

All your findings and arguments should be presented in the body of the text (more specifically in the results and discussion sections if you are following a scientific structure). The conclusion is meant to summarize and reflect on the evidence and arguments you have already presented, not introduce new ones.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, April 13). Writing a Research Paper Conclusion | Step-by-Step Guide. Scribbr. Retrieved September 18, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/research-paper-conclusion/

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A well-structured essay is important as it enhances readability, ensures logical flow, and effectively communicates the main ideas. When your essay is clearly organised it helps the reader understand and retain the essay's key points.

A typical assignment has an introduction, a main body and a conclusion. The purpose of the introduction is to signpost everything that a reader can expect from the assignment. The main body is where this will be delivered, and the conclusion provides a summary of the main points, perhaps guiding us to further reading or investigation.

A high-quality essay is composed of high-quality sentences. This page focuses on rules for writing complete sentences that flow together to create a well written academic piece.

Common errors in structure

This guide highlights common errors in structure and argument, and gives you a short explanation of what you can do to avoid them.

Black-and-white photo of a woman holding her child on a stone pier, with small wooden boats and a shoreline in the background.

Takako Isayama, a 12-year-old congenital victim of Minamata disease, with her mother, in Minimata, Japan, 1972. Photo W Eugene Smith and © Aileen Mioko Smith

The risk of beauty

W eugene smith’s photos of the minamata disaster are both exquisite and horrifying. how might we now look at them.

by Joanna Pocock + BIO

There is a moment in my life that marks a split between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. I was around 12 years old, sitting cross-legged on the cream carpet in my family’s living room in Ottawa when I opened a large, heavy book, awkward in my skinny arms. The texture of the paper was strange: it was matt, a word I didn’t know then. The ink was blacker than anything I had seen. A pure void – no light, no reflection, nothing. My fingers left small shiny traces on the paper, which took a few seconds to disappear. My child’s mind could not understand what it was seeing.

Bodies. Contortions. Something was very wrong. Humans who had been put together incorrectly, limbs sticking out at odd angles, crumpled like broken birds’ wings, like snapped twigs.

I kept looking, trying to make sense of these photographs.

Pipes discharging wastewater into a black sea.

Schools of fish. Boats with men and women hauling bulging nets onto the decks.

A sparkling factory, its lights like stars in a black sky. It looked like a spaceship.

I was staring into my father’s copy of Minamata (1975), W Eugene Smith and Aileen M Smith’s masterpiece of photojournalism with accompanying essays. It was published three years after the Smiths’ photo essay ‘Death-Flow from a Pipe’ had appeared in Life magazine. Eugene Smith and his then-wife Aileen had spent three years in the small fishing village of Minamata in Japan documenting the effects of mercury poisoning by the Japanese Chisso Corporation for the purposes of their essay, which was expanded to become the hefty Minamata .

Black and white photo of two photographers outdoors, the man is holding a long-lens camera up to his eye, while the woman is looking at him.

About halfway through the book, I came across the photo that truly claimed me, spread across two pages.

The left is almost all black. We are in a small room; the photographer must also be in the room as the figures are so close to us. On the right-hand page, a woman holds the rigid body of a teenager. The teenager is naked. All we can make out is her three-quarter profile, eyes rolled upwards, her teeth showing through a slightly opened mouth, her skinny torso, ribs, deformed hands hovering in the air; one knee resting on her mother’s wrist, the other hovering. Her thick black hair flops back from her forehead. You can almost feel the steam filling the room like hot breath.

This photo , ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ by Eugene Smith, triggered something profound that I have never been able to shake or even fully comprehend. Why this image? Why did it penetrate so deeply? The effect it had on me has something to do with the fact that it was pure accident that led me to it; the photo found me, rather than the other way round. By discovering it in one of my father’s books, I felt I had stumbled upon a secret, something I wasn’t meant to see. The pain captured in this photo – and captured so humanely – was something that I, a child of the Canadian suburbs, had never seen. This kind of before-and-after moment is expressed by Susan Sontag in her book On Photography (1977). Her ‘first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror’, she tells us, was ‘a kind of revelation’. It was photos of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that she came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945 that broke her. ‘Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,’ she writes. ‘Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was 12) and after.’

S eeing Tomoko’s young, contorted body was the moment I realised there was such a thing as horror and that those who are most affected are often victims of chance or fate. Here was a girl who, by dint of being born in Minamata rather than Ottawa, had been poisoned. All these years later, I am unnerved by the fact that Tomoko’s appearance was so unlike a healthy teenager that Sontag, writing about this very picture, could not make out that she was female, and referred instead to ‘Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his [sic] mother’s lap’. The youth was not male nor was she dying – she lived another five years. The composition of this photo echoes the classic pose of the Virgin Mary holding a dying Christ. Sontag sees it as a ‘Pietà for the world of plague victims’. Tomoko died for us all, is the subtext here – but it is important to note that she did not die from an uncontainable virus. She died because of a human-made environmental catastrophe.

Marble statue depicting a woman holding a lifeless man in her lap, characterised by detailed drapery and emotional expression.

Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Courtesy Wikipedia

From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso Corporation dumped methylmercury-laced wastewater into Minamata Bay. From the mid-1940s, a ‘strange disease’ started to appear in town. At first, the symptoms – seizures, loss of motor control, numbness, paralysis, sensory impairment and death within weeks, months or years from the first signs of illness – were described anecdotally. However, in 1957, a Chisso Corporation doctor gave it a name: Minamata disease. Babies were born deformed, blind and with a range of disabilities as the mercury passed through their mother’s placenta. Sometimes, the unborn baby acted as a sponge for the toxin, leaving some mothers without symptoms. This was the case for Tomoko Kamimura. Her family called her their ‘treasure child’ because she spared her mother from the disease.

Just as in fairy tales, the poison gets out, it spreads; there is always a story in its wake

For years, the Chisso Corporation would not accept any correlation between its industrial waste and Minamata disease. Yet this connection made so much sense – even to my child’s mind: you poison the water, the fish end up toxic. People eat the fish, they get sick. How could it have taken so many years and a lengthy photographic exposé to join the dots? The Smiths’ 1972 photo essay in Life drew global attention to the issue of mercury poisoning. Their photographs played a huge part in Chisso accepting responsibility and paying compensation to those affected by the disease. By 2004, the corporation had paid out $86 million to claimants. The company was also ordered to ‘clean up’ the contamination. But the thing with water is that you can’t clean it up. Once the poison is there, it never goes away. All you can do is stop eating the fish.

I don’t remember going beyond the photo of Tomoko when I pored over Minamata as a child. But I do remember the feeling I had as I closed the book: I knew, I just knew in my bones, that Minamata wasn’t really very far away, and that poison – like horror – doesn’t observe boundaries: it never stays in the pot. Just as in fairy tales, the poison gets out, it spreads; there is always a story in its wake. It wasn’t simply the content of that image that seared my memory, but the fact that someone had gone there to document it . This gets to the heart of the importance of the photographic enterprise. A photo like ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ exists because someone needed to take it.

An image has a provenance, a context and a history. The moment of a photograph’s inception is the moment a human has put themselves behind a camera to be a witness. The photographer’s intention is woven into the fabric of the photograph from its beginning. You could say that the decisions made on the part of the maker (where to stand, where to point the camera) are the source of an image, and its meaning flows from that source. Without that spark of intent, there would be no photograph. All of which is to say that one can feel the presence of Eugene Smith in the image of Tomoko – a presence unique to him, to his desire to enter that bathroom and show us that even intimate moments are not immune to being penetrated by the horrors of this world. In our drone-saturated, AI-infected, Photoshopped world, the maker is often lost or forgotten. Images labelled ‘content’ are deprived of context or meaning. We are daily bombarded with photographic images whose provenance we simply have no idea about, and whose intentions are often murky.

‘W hat good was served’ by seeing photos of camp survivors, Sontag asks? But perhaps an equally important question is: how were the subjects served by the reproduction and propagation of their image?

Eugene Smith believed he had two responsibilities: one to his subjects and one to his viewers. The story of ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ begins with Smith spending enough time with the Kamimuras for them to trust him during an intimate moment, followed by his hand clicking the shutter, but it does not end with the image on photographic paper or the deaths of the subject and the maker. When a French television company contacted the Kamimura family about a documentary they were making about the most important photographs of the 20th century, Yoshio Kamimura refused to be interviewed, stating that he wanted his daughter to ‘be laid to rest’.

A photograph emigrates from the territory of the present into the well of timelessness where art dwells

Aileen Smith had inherited the copyright to the image after Eugene’s death in 1978; when she heard of the family’s reaction, she travelled to Minamata and passed on the copyright to the Kamimuras. ‘This photograph would be a profanity if it continued to be issued against the will of Tomoko and her family,’ Aileen said . ‘The decision I made as holder of copyright to the photograph “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath” was … made after a great deal of deliberation, with love and care,’ she wrote – no doubt thinking about Eugene’s sense of responsibility to his subjects. Yoshio Kamimura could not alter the fate of his daughter, but he could decide how her image was used – if at all. As of 1998, 21 years after Tomoko’s death, it became against copyright to reproduce this photo, the one I have been carrying inside myself since I was a child. The Smiths knew the limits of the photographic image. ‘Photography is neither medicine nor god,’ Aileen wrote. ‘The photograph “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath”, in spite of its worldwide release, could not cure Tomoko’s illness.’

In its passage from ‘document of reality’ to ‘iconic work of art’ – a journey that often happens with the passage of time – a photograph emigrates from the territory of the present into the well of timelessness where art dwells. It’s a journey that can also drain an image of some of its potency. As an exercise in photographic time-travel, I think about aerial images of razed old-growth forests featuring lost-looking solitary orangutans, or unmanned drone images of ravaged war-torn cities, often described as ‘like something from a movie’. I imagine looking at them 50 years hence. Will some emigrate from ‘document’ or ‘reportage’ to ‘art’? Should they? Do we have a responsibility to prevent this alchemy or should we welcome it?

This is the paradox of the Pietà: although we may be broken by confronting horror, we also risk being comforted by the beauty of an image. But if we remember that someone went there to document it , perhaps we can bring some of the immediacy and potency back to an image. This act of returning authorship to a photograph cannot happen with the endless stream of images we scroll past on our phones. ‘Images transfix. Images anesthetize,’ Sontag writes when she describes how the shock of a photographic image ‘wears off with repeated viewings … making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.’

T owards the end of 2023, I got the urge to revisit Minamata . I had no idea where my father’s first edition had gone after he died, so I asked my husband for a copy for Christmas. The one he got me was beautiful, but nothing like the original of my childhood. The pages were glossy, not matt, and its soft cover sat more comfortably in my arms. I started reading it in bed on Christmas day, when I fell ill with COVID-19. On page 138, I came upon Smith’s Pietà. This time, I knew it was coming, but I was still unprepared. I had shrunk down the image over the years in my memory until it was small enough to fit inside me. In the book, Ryoko and Tomoko’s surname is given as Uemura (a mistranslation by Eugene Smith from the Japanese). His text tells us that on the day of the court victory for victims affected by mercury poisoning, one newspaper ran the headline ‘The Day That Tomoko Smiled’. Smith adds with his trademark directness: ‘She couldn’t have cared less. She couldn’t possibly have known.’ And if Tomoko had been aware of the newspaper headline, it would have given her cold comfort. No compensation, however large, could make her healthy. Tomoko Kamimura died in 1977 at the age of 21. Eugene Smith died a year later, at 59.

When I was 12, I didn’t go beyond the photo of Tomoko. I stopped there and put the book down. But this Christmas I carried on. I turned the page and got a shock. What I had felt as a child, that what had happened in Minamata could happen anywhere – that horror could not be contained – was borne out. On the reverse of Smith’s Pietà was the startling heading: ‘Canada: Half a World Away’.

The Canadian section in Minamata about Grassy Narrows runs to a mere four pages. Grassy Narrows is a First Nation settlement about an hour’s drive from Kenora, in northwestern Ontario, the province I had grown up in. I knew of Kenora because it had been in the news back in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Also, around this time, one of my sisters started dating a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation. I had visited his family on his reservation in upstate New York. He had a sister my age and we have remained in touch all these years. My sister married him and the issues around the government’s treatment of people I knew, who were now part of my family, became another source of grief and horror to my young self, linked now to the seed that had been planted in me by the Smiths’ photographic work.

Aileen Smith begins the Canadian section in Minamata by telling us that, two years previously, Gene had received a letter from some Ontario residents who were ‘fighting a lonely battle against mercury and destroying their main source of income in the process’. These people owned a tourist business along the English-Wabigoon River near Kenora. For centuries, this land had been prime hunting and fishing territory for the Grassy Narrows tribe, whose original name in the Ojibwe language is Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, and whose history and culture are based around a profound and ongoing connection to the land – a land that now appeared to be poisoning them. Between 1962 and 1970, Dryden Chemicals (a Canadian subsidiary of the British multinational the Reed Paper Group Ltd) used mercury to make caustic soda and chlorine for bleaching their paper products. As part of the manufacturing process, they dumped more than 9,000 kg of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River upstream of the Grassy Narrows reserve.

It turns out that Minamata was far closer to me than I had been told, and yet somehow my child self knew this

The story in Grassy Narrows tragically echoes the story in Minamata. It would be comforting to think of this level of human and environmental devastation as something from the past, and yet how wrong this would be. There is little information out there about Ontario’s mercury-tainted water, but a 2017 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article by the journalist Jody Porter, who died in 2022, reported that ‘90 per cent of the population in Grassy Narrows experiences symptoms of mercury poisoning’, including ‘neurological problems ranging from numbness in fingers and toes to seizures and cognitive delays.’ Health services on the reserve consist of one small nursing station.

In 2014, the 17-year-old Calvin Kokopenace died from mercury poisoning in Grassy Narrows. His younger sister Azraya struggled with the loss, and in 2016 she sought help. Ontario police officers dropped her off at the Lake of the Woods District Hospital in Kenora. Two days later, her dead body was found nearby. Her family has been trying to get an autopsy report and an inquest but no one will give them the information they need to understand Azraya’s final hours. The 14-year-old has become another statistic in Canada’s long list of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It is such a common fate, that the acronym MMIW has a hashtag. Azraya’s friends believe her death was tied to despair over the loss of her brother. One of Azraya’s cousins, Chayna Loon, told the CBC: ‘Knowing how Calvin died, we could all be dying. We probably are, already, and we don’t know what’s going to happen because nobody is helping.’ It turns out that Minamata was far closer to me than I had been told, and yet somehow my child self knew this.

Back in the 1970s, the provincial government of Ontario told Grassy Narrows residents to stop eating fish, their main staple. Then all the commercial fisheries were shut down. Yet the Canadian government still refused to admit there was a problem. For years, Dryden Chemicals executives insisted there was no correlation between their plant and the presence of mercury in the water, despite the fact that fish caught near the mill showed much higher levels of mercury than fish caught further away. Private water-testers found levels of mercury in fish in the English-Wabigoon River to be as high as 27.8 parts per million (ppm). To give a sense of scale, the US Food and Drug Administration now says that the maximum safe level of mercury in seafood is 1 ppm. The Canadian government has since admitted that ‘some mercury levels in local fish were 30 times what was “acceptable”.’

The community’s staple food was now lethal, local jobs had disappeared, and Grassy Narrows went into decline. Suicide rates were high, as were cases of substance abuse. Because symptoms of Minamata disease can present in similar ways to the effects of alcohol poisoning, insult was added to injury by those in power who suggested that the symptoms they were seeing in the population were merely the signs of alcoholism. A 2020 article in The Lancet describes Grassy Narrows as being the epicentre of ‘one of the worst cases of environmental poisoning in Canadian history’. Despite this, a quick Google of nearby Kenora brings up this:

Take a cruise on Lake of the Woods on the MS Kenora or get your picture taken with Husky the Muskie, a 40 foot tall, 2-ton replica of a fish the lake is famous for. Kenora is known for its waterfront beauty and there are five major beaches in town.

A ‘muskie’ is the shortened form of muskellunge, a fish famous in Canada for its giant size. You can feed many people from a muskie. You could also potentially make them ill.

Steve Fobister, a former chief of the Grassy Narrows community and a campaigner for environmental justice, died in 2018 at the age of 66, just one year after Porter interviewed him for her CBC article. She wrote that Fobister ‘now has difficulty standing and swallowing … Even talking is a chore. It often requires him to hold his lower jaw with his thumb to reduce the shaking long enough to form words.’ The government still won’t admit that anyone at Grassy Narrows has been poisoned – only that some people ‘experience symptoms of Minamata disease’. Where is the person willing to go there and document it ? Where is the Pietà for Grassy Narrows?

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky does indeed photograph ecological devastation in Ontario, his home province, and beyond. However, his photos of mines, tailing ponds and blasted, poisoned landscapes depict the land without its people. Burtynsky turns ecological disaster into wall-size collectible images oozing terror and beauty. In the early 1980s, he stood on the edges of vast open pit mines across North America to show us the precipitous craters left behind from mining. His images are unsettling: tailing ponds sparkle like gemstones in Earth’s crust, deep-cut mining sites become geometric quilts. He later captured the patterned landscapes created by dryland farms in Spain from the open door of a helicopter. He goes higher again, photographing from a Cessna; and by 2021, he is using remote-controlled drones to photograph diseased olive trees in Puglia, soil erosion in Turkey and rare earth metal mining, among other ecologically devastating resource extraction. His trajectory from a hand-held camera to aerial drones is the trajectory of our times. His images are elegiac, abstract and aesthetically beautiful, and yet just below their surface they speak of devastation. Because of this, they sidestep the ‘paradox of the Pietà’. They fall fully formed into the well of art.

T he problem with raising awareness of social or environmental issues, whether in the form of Smith’s emotionally charged Pietà or Burtynsky’s cool abstractions, is that, in order to ‘fix’ the problems, we would need to completely change the way we live, the way we think, do business, raise children, grow food, and live out our lives on the most granular level. Aggressive farming practices, the liberal application of pesticides, the proliferation of single-use plastics, disposable technologies requiring the extraction of metals, and a mindset of uncontained overconsumption mean that situations like Grassy Narrows will carry on.

Expecting a single photograph or photographer to change this is unfair. Sontag believed that: ‘The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling …’ She continues: ‘Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance.’ I would add that when a photograph lands in the right hands, it can also plant a seed in a person’s deepest psyche. This sometimes comes at a personal cost not only to the subject, but to the photographer. Smith was badly beaten by Chisso’s hired security guards while photographing protesters in Japan. He suffered serious physical injuries that dogged him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he did go there and document it.

Since I started writing about Smith’s photo, I have noticed that my relationship to ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ has altered dramatically over the years. Where my childhood gaze was locked on Tomoko, my adult gaze now registers the presence of Tomoko’s mother. She, too, is naked and vulnerable in the bath with her daughter. Her expression is loving, concerned, peaceful, almost expectant, as if waiting for Tomoko to say something. Her downcast eyes are fixed on her daughter’s upturned face. What I hadn’t grasped then but now see so clearly is that those of us unaffected so directly by horror share something profound with Tomoko’s mother. We, too, are witnesses, and it is our job to hold the painful, suffering bodies left in the wake of devastation.

Seeing how horror can arrive unbidden on the doorstep of the innocent was the moment I lost my innocence. As a middle-aged woman, my gaze has shifted from the teenager to her mother. I’ve realised that is it she who holds the key. Maybe this is the most we can expect from an image of horror: that it asks us not to look away. It demands that we stay with it, and that we allow it to do its work within us: that we take on the gaze of Tomoko’s mother. Eugene Smith went there to document it ; Life magazine brought his photo to the world. The rest is, and always has been, up to us.

Photo of a doll with curly red hair, blue eyes, and a large maroon hat, wearing a double string of pearls and a red dress.

Rituals and celebrations

Tender, yet creepy

Dolls help children create wonderfully vivid and imaginative worlds, while also serving as unsettling reminders of the abyss

Tishani Doshi

Painting of a rural street on a dark night featuring a two-storey white farmhouse, a red barn, powerlines, and a bright light in the centre.

Sleep and dreams

Spinning the night self

After years of insomnia, I threw off the effort to sleep and embraced the peculiar openness I found in the darkest hours

Annabel Abbs

Painting of two men sitting in a barn, one on a bench and the other on a chair, with a horse and pumpkins in the background.

History of ideas

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Fresco fragment with geometric borders framing curved shapes representing waves crashing upon the shore, partially damaged.

Nature and landscape

Laughing shores

Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination

Giordano Lipari

Photo of a light beige woven fabric with black and red borders on the sides, frayed edges at the bottom, and a black background.

Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

Black-and-white photo of a man in a suit and hat grabbing another man by his collar in front of a bar with bottles.

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Clintel essay: Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God

Press release Clintel Foundation

Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God, a tale of two encyclicals

Amsterdam, 17 September 2024

By uncritically embracing climate catastrophism, Pope Francis, perhaps unwittingly and most certainly unwillingly, rejects the God he clearly tries to serve wholeheartedly. That is the main conclusion of the essay Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God , a tale of two encyclicals , written by Jaap C. Hanekamp and William M. Briggs and published by Clintel.

Pope Francis outlined his views on climate change in two encyclicals, Laudato Si’ (2015) and Laudate Deum (2023). Concisely, the Pope fears that the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point because of climate change. In fact, the Pope announced in his encyclicals that there is a “global climate crisis.”

In the essay Pope Francis’ Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God chemist and theologian Jaap C. Hanekamp and statistician and meteorologist William M. Briggs reflect on both encyclicals, though they do not assess the scientific information on climate change as such. Instead, they examine the Pope’s use and understanding of models, and delve deeper into the overarching philosophy that sustains both encyclicals. They conclude that the Pope, carelessly in their view, embraces scientism , and not science , which inadvertently weakens his position, and those that follow his scientistic prescriptions.

Scientism is the ideology that science alone is deemed capable of elucidating and resolving all genuine human problems, and that all human affairs can be reduced to science. Accordingly, scientism is the effort to expand science to all other fields of human affairs, even theology, and to usurp them in a reductionist fashion.

Hanekamp and Briggs conclude that the climate scientism Pope Francis peddles stands diametrically opposed to the Christian worldview. “Scientism of any stripe is incommensurable with not only the Christian faith but also with science.”

About the authors Jaap C. Hanekamp is a chemist by trade and received his first PhD in 1992. In 2015, he defended his second dissertation: Utopia and Gospel: Unearthing the Good News in Precautionary Culture . He blogs at https://jaaphanekamp.com/ . William M. Briggs holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences and an MS in Atmospheric Physics, and has served in various roles including professor, consultant, and statistician. He blogs at https://www.wmbriggs.com/ .

The essay can be downloaded here .

ABOUT CLINTEL The Climate Intelligence foundation (Clintel) was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. Clintel’s main objective is to generate knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of climate change, as well as the effects of climate policy. Clintel published the World Climate Declaration , which has now been signed by more than 1900 scientists and experts. Its central message is “there is no climate emergency”. In 2023 Clintel published the book The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC , in which it documented serious errors and biases in the latest IPCC report.

For more information, interview requests with the authors and other reactions, please contact Marcel Crok, director of Clintel, [email protected].

Please share!

Cultural Studies General
Popular Culture

Taylor Swift and Philosophy: Essays from the Tortured Philosophers Department

ISBN: 978-1-394-23860-6

August 2024

Wiley-Blackwell

Digital Evaluation Copy

Catherine M. Robb , Georgie Mills , William Irwin

Explore the philosophical wisdom of Taylor Swift and her music

Taylor Swift is a “Mastermind” when it comes to relationships, songwriting, and performing sold-out stadium tours. But did you know that Taylor is also a philosophical mastermind?

Taylor Swift and Philosophy is the first book to explore the philosophical topics that arise from Taylor Swift's life and music. Edited and authored by Swifties who also happen to be philosophers and scholars, this fun and engaging book is written with general readers in mind—you don't have to be a devoted fan or a specialist in philosophy to explore the themes, concepts, and questions expressed in Taylor's songs.

Is Taylor Swift a philosopher?
What can her songs tell us about ethics and society?
What is the nature of friendship?
Should you forgive someone for breaking your heart?

Presenting top-tier research and new perspectives on important contemporary issues, twenty-seven chapters discuss the philosophical contexts of Taylor's work, such as the ethics of reputational damage, the impacts of first impressions, the moral obligation to speak out against injustice, and much more.

Taylor Swift and Philosophy is a must-read for Swifties who want to deepen their appreciation and understanding of Taylor's work, as well as for philosophy students and scholars with an interest in popular culture and media studies.

CATHERINE M. ROBB is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University, Netherlands. Her research interests include ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and applied philosophy, with a focus on the nature and value of ability, skill and talent, and related ethical implications.

GEORGIE MILLS is a Research Fellow at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. She is primarily a philosopher of science, emotion, and medicine with a range of interests in the philosophy of pop culture. She has published work on Punk, Post-Punk, Britney Spears, and Ted Lasso .

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September 17, 2024 Issue
Young Surgeons: Submit Ess...

Young Surgeons: Submit Essays for History and Archives Committee Competition

September 17, 2024

The ACS History and Archives Committee offers a Young Surgeons Essay Competition that is intended to recognize and support young surgeons who are interested in the historical roots of the surgical profession and are dedicated to studying it. The objective is to produce a scholarly essay for publication using original historical research that will advance knowledge of the past, thus promoting both young surgeon historians and the history of surgery itself.

Young surgeons are invited to submit an essay on a historical topic of their choosing. The winner and runner up will be invited to publish their paper in a surgical journal, with publication costs covered, if accepted.

Entries are invited from young surgeons who must be the first and primary author.

Young surgeons are defined as:

Fellows 45 or younger
Associate Fellows 45 or younger
Resident members
Medical student members, who must be the first and primary author

Fellows older than 45 years of age may serve as additional or senior authors.

Submissions for the 2025 essay competition are now open, and the deadline to submit an entry is January 10, 2025. View the guidelines for the essay contest, including how and to whom to submit, and contact ACS Archivist Michael Beesley at [email protected] for more information.

In This Issue

Register Today for 2024 ACS Simulation in Surgical Education Course

Sign up for a chance to learn how simulation can teach and refine essential surgical skills; the course will take place November 13–16 in Dallas, TX.

Attend Academy Virtual Grand Rounds on the Learning Environment and Culture

Don't miss the Academy Virtual Grand Rounds this Thursday! Panelists will discuss learning culture in surgical education.

Mild TBI May Have Longer-Term Consequences on Cognitive Impairment

Listen to Dr. Mallory Jebbia discuss postdischarge cognitive impairment in certain brain injury patients.

Read about Evolving Management of Pancreatitis

Improving outcomes and quality of life for patients with pancreatitis may soon go beyond current approaches to include AI and genetic testing.

Learn Who Was Honored for Volunteerism and Humanitarian Efforts

ACS H.O.P.E. has announced the recipients of the 2024 ACS/Pfizer Surgical Volunteerism and Humanitarian Awards.

Register for New Traumatic Brain Injury Guidelines Course

The new course is for offers key recommendations in mortality reduction for clinicians committed to improving patient outcomes.

Participate in Hands-On Decision-Making and Ergonomics Clinics

The Surgical Metrics Project and the Surgical Ergonomics Clinic will return to the exhibit floor at this year’s Clinical Congress.

Second Victim Syndrome Must Be Addressed at Institutional Level, Article Suggests

Second victim syndrome can cause significant damage psychologically and adversely impact a clinician’s ability to provide patient care in the future.

Index Cholecystectomy for Acute Cholangitis Shows Better Outcomes versus Delayed

Acute cholangitis is a potentially life-threatening illness, and management is guided by the Tokyo Guidelines.

Intravenous Amino Acid Infusion May Reduce AKI Risk after Cardiac Surgery

Acute kidney injury is a significant complication following cardiac surgical procedures, due, in large part, to reduced renal perfusion.

Surgeons Discuss Recent Trends in Management of Acute Cholecystitis

Listen to Drs. Clancy Clark and Trang Nguyen discuss some of the latest trends in management of acute cholecystitis.

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COMMENTS

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How to End an Essay: Writing a Strong Conclusion
End your essay with a call to action, warning, or image to make your argument meaningful. Keep your conclusion concise and to the point, so you don't lose a reader's attention. Do your best to avoid adding new information to your conclusion and only emphasize points you've already made in your essay. Method 1.
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Conclusions
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Learn the formula for writing a powerful conclusion paragraph that summarizes your main points, highlights their significance, and leaves a lasting impression. See examples of conclusions for different types of essays and avoid common mistakes.
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Conclusions
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How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay
The first steps for writing any college essay are coming up with a strong thesis statement and composing a rough introduction.Once you've done that, you can collect information that supports your thesis, outline your essay's main points, and start writing your body paragraphs.Before you can submit the essay, though, you'll also need to write a compelling conclusion paragraph.
How To Write a Conclusion for an Essay: Expert Tips and Examples
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Aim to keep your conclusion shorter than your introduction. Aim to keep your conclusion under 5 sentences - Your conclusion must be memorable. If it is too long, a reader will struggle to hold the essence of your essay in their minds as their final interaction with your argument. Think about those points for a moment.
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How to write a conclusion. An effective conclusion is created by following these steps: 1. Restate the thesis. An effective conclusion brings the reader back to the main point, reminding the reader of the purpose of the essay. However, avoid repeating the thesis verbatim. Paraphrase your argument slightly while still preserving the primary point.
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Topic #5: Explain how to write an essay conclusion. Essay conclusions are pretty simple once you know the framework. It all boils down to three main parts: a transition from the last body paragraph, a summary of the thesis statement and main points of the essay, and a closing statement that wraps everything up. If all students knew this simple ...
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The conclusion is a very important part of your essay. Although it is sometimes treated as a roundup of all of the bits that didn't fit into the paper earlier, it deserves better treatment than that! It's the last thing the reader will see, so it tends to stick in the reader's memory. It's also a great place to remind the reader exactly why ...
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These functions are equally important in the structure of an essay. A conclusion is a paragraph (or set of paragraphs) that comes at the very end of an essay and it must restate the thesis (say what the essay has argued) and summarize the argument. Think about a conclusion from the reader's point of view as the end of a conversation.
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Strong conclusion examples pave the way for the perfect paper ending. See how to write a good conclusion for a project, essay or paper to get the grade.
Conclusions
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Table of contents. Step 1: Restate the problem. Step 2: Sum up the paper. Step 3: Discuss the implications. Research paper conclusion examples. Frequently asked questions about research paper conclusions.
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A well-structured essay is important as it enhances readability, ensures logical flow, ... A typical assignment has an introduction, a main body and a conclusion. The purpose of the introduction is to signpost everything that a reader can expect from the assignment. The main body is where this will be delivered, and the conclusion provides a ...
The Strengths And Weaknesses Of Coalition Government ...
Disclaimer: This essay is provided as an example of work produced by students studying towards a politics degree, it is not illustrative of the work produced by our in-house experts.Click here for sample essays written by our professional writers.. This essay is not an endorsement of any political party or statement. UKEssays.com does not accept payment of any kind for the publishing of ...
How should we look at images of horror and suffering?
It was published three years after the Smiths' photo essay 'Death-Flow from a Pipe' had appeared in Life magazine. Eugene Smith and his then-wife Aileen had spent three years in the small fishing village of Minamata in Japan documenting the effects of mercury poisoning by the Japanese Chisso Corporation for the purposes of their essay ...
Clintel essay: Pope Francis' Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in
That is the main conclusion of the essay Pope Francis' Climate Crusade or the erosion of faith in God, a tale of two encyclicals, written by Jaap C. Hanekamp and William M. Briggs and published by Clintel. Pope Francis outlined his views on climate change in two encyclicals, Laudato Si' (2015) and Laudate Deum (2023).
Taylor Swift and Philosophy: Essays from the Tortured Philosophers
<p>Explore the philosophical wisdom of Taylor Swift and her music <p>Taylor Swift is a “Mastermind” when it comes to relationships, songwriting, and performing sold-out stadium tours. But did you know that Taylor is also a philosophical mastermind? <p>Taylor Swift and Philosophy is the first book to explore the philosophical topics that arise from Taylor Swift's life and ...
Young Surgeons: Submit Essays for History and Archives Committee
The objective is to produce a scholarly essay for publication using original historical research that will advance knowledge of the past, thus promoting both young surgeon historians and the history of surgery itself. Young surgeons are invited to submit an essay on a historical topic of their choosing.