Conclusions represent the writer's last chance to convince readers of the significance of the subject and, possibly, of taking some action. A good conclusion reminds readers of the writer's thesis and main points, expressed succinctly and using fresh language. It then goes on to answer the question, so what? Assuming that the writer has made his or her case, why is it important? What are its implications? Why should the reader care?

The main job of a conclusion is to bring a sense of closure to the essay and to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Closure can be achieved in a number of ways:

       Asking a Pertinent Question:

              Will anything sensible be done? Of course not. The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money--and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse.

       --Gore Vidal "Drugs" in Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays 1952-1972.

       Illustrating the Central Point with a Quotation:

              History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good.

              Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.

              "The Land was ours before we were the land's," says Robert Frost's poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.

--Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place

       Presenting a Vivid Image:

              And on late-evening constitutionals along streets less traveled by, I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure. I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn't be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.

       --Brent Staples, "Just Walk on By"

       Predicting Future Consequences:

              The ads should be rejected. If one group advertises that the Holocaust never happened, another can buy space to insist that American blacks were never enslaved. The stakes are high because college newspapers may soon be flooded with ads that present discredited assertions as if they were part of normal historical debate. If the Holocaust is not a fact, then nothing is a fact, and truth itself will be diminished.

       --David M. Oshinsky and Michael Curtios, "Freedom of Speech and Holocaust Revisionism"

       Recommending a Course of Action:

              The major criticism of not teaching values is very simple: There are some values that teachers should affirm. Not all values are the same. My daughter is the only girl on her soccer team, and recently some of the boys on the team spit at her. The coach shouldn't have the boys justify their actions. He should have them stop. He should make sure they know they were wrong. That's what he should do. What he actually did tells you a lot about the schools today. He did nothing.

       --Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, "Not Just Read and Write, but Right and Wrong"

       Returning to an Annecdote, Image, or Scene Presented in the Introduction:

              [Introduction] If survival is an art, then mangroves are artists of the beautiful: not only that they exist at all--smooth-barked, glossy-leaved, thickets of lapped mystery--but that they can and do exist as floating islands, as trees upright and loose, alive and homeless on the water.

              [Conclusion] The planet is less like an enclosed spaceship--spaceship earth--than it is like an exposed mangrove island beautiful and loose. We the people started small and have since accumulated a great and solacing muck of soil, of human culture. We are rooted in it; we are bearing it with us across nowhere. The word "nowhere" is our cue: the consort of musicians strikes up, and we in the chorus stir and move and start twirling our hats. A mangrove island turns drift to dance. It creates its own soil as it goes, rocking over the salt sea at random, rocking day and night and round the sun, rocking round the sun and out toward east of Hercules.

       --Annie Dillard, "Sojourner"

Some Strategies to Avoid:

• General comments that diffuse the energy of the essay

• Assertions that your solution or stance is the only valid one

• Introducing new issues

In Conclusion, conclusions should do the following:
 

• Remind reader of the central point(s) of the essay

• Convey the significance or implications of the thesis

• Bring closure to the essay