Katie Aquino

Writing, Grammar, Literature, ACT Prep
Education: M.Ed.,Stanford University

Katie is an enthusiastic teacher who strives to make connections between literature and student’s every day lives.

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Conclusion Paragraph

Katie Aquino
Katie Aquino

Writing, Grammar, Literature, ACT Prep
Education: M.Ed.,Stanford University

Katie is an enthusiastic teacher who strives to make connections between literature and student’s every day lives.

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When writing conclusion paragraphs, it is important to remember a few important things. First, a conclusion paragraph should return to the hook. Next, an effective conclusion paragraph should restate your thesis. Finally, a concluding paragraph should try to relate to the reader when applicable.

If you're anything like me, conclusions can be the most frustrating part of a paper, you've been working on it for a while and you just want to be done. So I want to give you a couple of tricks that will help make conclusion writing a little bit easier and I call them the three R's. So in every conclusion, you want to make sure you return to your hook and that's going to really make your paper feel like it's coming full circle. Restate your thesis, and when I say restate I mean reword it altogether, you don't want to just copy and paste your thesis statement from the introduction to the conclusion and then relate to the reader's world, they'll reach a higher conclusion, alright?
So some tricks to remember, do not introduce new ideas in your conclusion; this is a place where you're summing up everything that you've said. If you've got a new idea, add it to the body of your paper. Please don't start with 'in conclusion' or 'in closing' or anything that looks similar to that. We know it's your conclusion, we see it's the last paragraph of your paper; you don't need to tell us that, alright? And then like I said before, reword, reword, so you don't want to just return to your hook by copying and pasting it, or copy and paste your thesis statement, you want to actually work on paraphrasing or redoing it. So let's take a look at an example and see if we can identify the three R's, right.
Here we have a conclusion that one of my students wrote about the book 'The Chocolate War' and the essay asked this person to compare Jerry Renault, who's the main character, to a revolutionary that had existed in the world. So here's how they closed up, "Loyalty to petrified opinion is overrated-both Nat Turner and Jerry Renault knew this. In an effort to brake the chains of their times..." wow, you can tell it's a student writing, like 'break', "...the chains of their times, they both gave their all in a fight against accepted traditions. They were willing to risk their own safety and livelihoods for the sake of changing their worlds for the better. If more people were inspired by these two men today, this world would be a more just place."
Alright, so let's start with that first R and we can do this in any order. Let's take a look, we have this "Loyalty to petrified opinion is overrated" and if you are kind of a literary 'person', you might recognize this as a famous quote from Mark Twain and if you looked at the introduction to this paper, that's how this person laid the paper out. So here is that return to hook. And you'll notice that they didn't just copy and paste the quote that they started with here; they just referenced a part of it as a means to return to it, alright? So then we have "Both Nat Turner and Jerry Renault knew this. In an effort to break the chains of their times, they both gave their all in a fight against accepted traditions," and that was the thesis statement; this is what these two had in common. "Both Nat Turner and Jerry Renault fought against accepted traditions," so there's the restatement of the thesis. And then "They were willing to risk their own safety and livelihoods for the sake of changing their worlds," and here's where we reconnect to the reader and we kind of take this, we give the paper a meaning in the real world. "If more people were to be inspired by these two men, this world would be a more just place," so here is where we reach the reader. Now again, you can do these R's in any order, it doesn't matter but just make sure they are there in your conclusions and hopefully this will make that frustrating part of the paper a little bit easier.

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