Useful Tips on Writing a Conclusion Paragraph of an Essay

Writing different kinds of essays has become a regular task given to both college and high school students. And it’s not an easy task. Difficulties can be experienced because there are different types of essays, like persuasive, argumentative, analytical, compare and contrast essays, etc., and each of them has specific features you need to know. At the same time, professional essay writers as well as college professors and school teachers claim that any type of essay should have a certain structure. You need to start with an introduction, where you state your topic of discussion or your thesis, and try to grab the reader’s attention. Then you develop your ideas in the main body which usually consists of a few paragraphs. And you should finish your essay with a good conclusion. Of course, writing each of the essay parts can be tricky—how to write a good introduction and conclusion, how many paragraphs should be there in the main body—these questions definitely have been asked by many students. But, usually writing a conclusion is the most challenging task for many of them. So, what makes a really good conclusion?

Firstly, it’s necessary to understand what a conclusion serves for. It should provide a short but powerful outline of your opinion and/or arguments to support your thesis. It should also make the reader of your essay think about the issue you wrote about and, probably inspire him/her to take some actions. The reader of your essay should be able to use your conclusion as a summary of all your ideas and as a reference to your thesis.

Secondly, it’s a good idea to structure the conclusion paragraph of your essay. Generally, they define three/four parts of an essay conclusion paragraph.

Structure of an Essay Conclusion Paragraph

• In the beginning, you should restate the main thesis of your essay. Depending on the topic, the length, and the type of your essay you might need more than one sentence to do this.

Then you need to summarize your arguments or ideas on the issue. In your conclusion, you should avoid repeating details, providing new citations, and adding any new information.

• If you feel important to do this, just make changes to the main body of your essay. To be successful in doing this summary, it’s necessary to re-read your essay and think over thoroughly the way of restating all your arguments and ideas. The reader of your essay should be able to use your conclusion to refer back to the points highlighted in your essay.
• For many types of essays, a call for action can become an organic part of your conclusion. This call can be expressed directly, like “scientists should….” or “all people should…” Another great possibility to call for actions or just to make the readers of your essay think about the problem you are discussing is to ask a rhetorical question. It will be great if that your question provokes thoughts and refers to a bigger picture of the problem.
• The last sentence or a few of them of your essay conclusion should serve as a final note of your essay, giving the reader a feeling that everything is clear and nothing could or should be added.

Dos and Don’ts of an Essay Conclusion Paragraph.

• Don’t use personalized sentences ( like ” I think”) unless you are writing an opinion essay
• The language you use should be simple, but concise. You also shouldn’t be too wordy.
• Don’t use transition words like “in conclusion”,” to summarize” or other of the kind. It should be clear from the context that you are summarizing your ideas.
• Use different “tricks” to attract attention to your writing. One of such “tricks” can be echoing when in the conclusion paragraph you refer to some specific details mentioned in the introduction.

Writing an essay conclusion paragraph is a tricky job as you have to squeeze all ideas and arguments you tried to present in your essay into a few sentences in one paragraph. They say that it’s always harder to simplify something than to make it more difficult. This job demands skills of analytical and critical thinking. So, it’s worth getting some training in writing different types of essays and their conclusion paragraphs in particular.