What you’ll learn to do: identify strategies for writing effective introductions and conclusions

A key piece of advice many writers either don’t ever receive or don’t believe is that 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. Good writing is a recursive process, and even when a writer does put down the introduction first or the conclusion last, he or she will return to it frequently to see how it fits with the rest of the piece. Likewise, a writer may want to make a strong statement in a conclusion and, thus, write that section first, building the rest of the piece around it. Consider how some successful movies bounce around in time in a non-linear fashion to make the story more compelling. Your composing process can follow such an approach. Obviously your end product won’t resemble a movie that starts in the middle of the story, but it can be a very productive way for you to build the pieces that will make up your final work.