Introductions and Conclusions

It’s not necessary to write introductions first or to write conclusions last. Just because the introduction appears first and the conclusion appears last doesn’t mean they have to be written that way. Just because you walk into a building through the door doesn’t mean the door was built first. And the larger frame for this point about being flexible in your thinking, and in the writing that both reflects and shapes that thinking, is that academic writing is not a “one size fits all” enterprise. INTD 106 does not present a set of rules, especially in this module on the writing process. INTD 105 and other writing-intensive courses in conjunction with INTD 106 will not teach you everything you need to know about writing academically in one semester; this advice and the introduction to conventions of standardized, academic prose function partly to share knowledge evenly among students who have taken very different paths to SUNY Geneseo, but also to give you a basis in the principles of good writing—principles that may well resonate differently for you in your first year than they do in your junior year. If you don’t revisit the principles, you won’t hear the resonances, so we encourage you to think about yourself as a constantly developing writer.

Introductions

In working toward the overall goal of orienting readers, introductions often

  •  lay out the stakes for the piece of writing—that is, why the reader should bother reading on. Situate your writing within a larger scholarly conversation.
  • articulate a main thesis fully. The detail will generate the key vocabulary that will give coherence to your whole essay, so don’t be vague, broad, or coy, promising some really important claim based on really amazing evidence but refusing to say yet what that claim is. Readers don’t pick up college essays for the sheer suspense of it all…. The key vocabulary you generate in your introduction will recur in your topic sentences; when your topic sentences follow through logically and predictably on the claim you make in the introduction, your essay is focused. Your readers, far from feeling as if the surprise has been ruined when your essay turns out to support your thesis, will thank you for not confusing them.
  • suggest the bodies of evidence that you’ll draw on to prove your claim, but DON’T PROVIDE THE EVIDENCE ITSELF. Again, in your introduction, you are generating key terms that you will develop later. Development and evidence are what body paragraphs are for.
  • provide background about a topic that will make newcomers feel welcome and confident about reading on.
  • locate readers in a specific time and/or place or include some other method to make the ideas seem concrete.
  • include an ethical appeal, with which you (explicitly or implicitly) show that you’ve done your homework and are credible. NOTE TO SELF: don’t be grandiose about your appeal. The aim is not to shock and awe your readers into submission with your superior intellect, or, as more often happens, to present some obvious ethical idea that, for all its undeniable validity, doesn’t (or shouldn’t) come as news to anyone. Too often, student essays collapse under the weight of an idea that may well be really important, but shouldn’t be the rhetorical highpoint of your introduction because, frankly, it’s obvious. You risk sounding very high-school by announcing the equivalent of, “And thus I shall demonstrate, through this carefully selected evidence, that true love is based on mutual affection, not finances” (or that “we should, in fact, embrace diversity,” or that “academic intelligence is not the same as ‘street smarts'”). Yes, these things are true, and they are very important ideas to grasp, but they are so true that you risk obscuring the specific ethical appeal in your ideas by collapsing it into broad statements that your reader very probably does not need to hear as if they were “the big reveal.”

Conclusions

Conclusions usually

  • bookend a story or conversation that started in the introduction. 
  • reiterate an ethical appeal, with which you (explicitly or implicitly) connect the logic of the argument to a more passionate reason intended to sway the reader, or in which you restate your central stakes in a rhetorically heightened fashion because this is your last chance to make your point.
  • issue a call to action. 
Ideally, a conclusion will work in tandem with an introduction, having some kind of “call back” element to remind your reader of the powerful opening you provided. Be careful, though, about summarizing your argument in a conclusion. If you stated your thesis clearly in your introduction and unfolded the arc of that thesis via topic sentences that constantly reminded readers where you and they were situated in your argument, then reiterating your argument in its entirety can be a boring waste of a final paragraph.

One related pet peeve of college professors is when students give the clearest statement of their thesis in the conclusion: “And now to sum it all up, let me finally tell you what my point was, and how I thought my evidence supported it. And out.”  To the person who just read through 5-10 pages of college-level material, the summary conclusion is frustrating: generate interest and a sense that you have something coherent and important to say at the start of your essay. Then go ahead and write that essay. Then end with an engaged reminder of the stakes of your argument, but NOT with a plodding, abstracted recapitulation of the steps you took along the way. Readers were right there with you for the whole trip, attending to your every twist and turn, looking always for your guidance and direction. If you guided them well, you don’t need to tell them where they just were: they know. And really don’t expect them to be excited if, instead of guiding them, you blindfolded them and stumbled along (often down what seemed to be detours and dead ends, or in circles), only to graciously present them with a detailed map of the journey they wish they’d known they were taking when they’ve already arrived (exhausted) at the destination.

Additional, less exasperated advice for conclusions is found in the following video.