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A strong conclusion will boost the quality of your essay, while a poor conclusion will just turn your essay into a disaster. Yet, some college students just hurry the last part, for the sake of finishing their essays. They fail to wrap-up their essay and leave their readers uncertain and unconvinced. So below are tips on how to write a conclusion for an essay.
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Structure of the Conclusion
Classic essay structure is that the conclusion begins narrowly and ends expansively (Payne, 1965). It starts with a specific summary of your key points and arguments. Next, your thesis statement is restated, in the form shaped by your arguments. Finally, the conclusion is closed by a final statement that imparts a generalized understanding of your essay topic.
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An English teacher once gave me this advice in my personal essay, “You do not have to end your personal essay with a life lesson all the time. You can also look forward and end your essay with a statement about your future. You can use statements about possibilities and not just about past learnings.”
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Don’t Panic, Don’t Get Lost
If you are starting to panic in writing your essay conclusion, it means that you’ve gone off the limits of what is being required of you in your essay question. Remember that you are only asked to write a conclusion for “your particular thesis statement” and not a conclusion of the topic itself.
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Also remember that you are only required to sum up “your essay and your arguments” and not the thousands of complex arguments, other experts may have about the issue. This is why some students get so stressed about writing for essays topics such as abortion essay or global warming essay because they feel that they need to present all the arguments ever written about the topic. The scope of your essay is limited by your thesis statement, so focus on that.
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Good Essay Writing, Follows the Structure of Human Reasoning
If you think about it, essay writingfollows the way we humans find answers or understand the events in this world. We begin with questions, which is usually included in the essay introduction. We don’t start with a blank slate. We have our assumptions from our past experiences and learning. We also love to guess and hypothesize. Then we investigate and research arguments and evidence and this becomes part of the body of the essay. Next, we evaluate and form our findings.
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Finally, from this specific essay question and finding, we don’t just stop and think that it only applies to a specific instance. As humans, we naturally generalize our understanding and experiences. Our brains evolved that way, so we can function and survive in this world. We may have a specific experience about a certain cat, but our understanding of this cat, is used as a general understanding of all cats. We may not even find the answers, but each pursuit of the question, leads us to another path in investigating that question.
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Conclusion- A Better Understanding or Passing the Torch
How to write an essay conclusion? Satisfy your reader’s need to understand your thesis statement. You may not even have the answer to your question and conclude that more research is needed. Your conclusion, however, has led to a better understanding of the phenomena you were investigating, and opened a new path where others may continue the pursuit of knowledge.