Are You Concluding Your Academic Essays Correctly?

You’ve just written the bulk of your paper and want to finish it off – let it be complete before you leave it, as coming back later will only mean more time (and possibly more torment). This isn’t the case though, as you should leave a short time between completing writing your essay and writing the conclusion for your academic essay. Go for a walk and clear your head, try to go over the steps in your essay and what you have achieved – you will need this when you sit down to write your conclusion in a shirt while.

Is it conclusion or conclusions?
One key thing to clear up here is the difference between a ‘conclusion’ and ‘conclusions'. Conclusions are made throughout your paper, when you are recognizing that a certain author made an advancement in rabbit fertility, or organinisational culture change management, etc. Conclusions are made by you to the reader re-enforcing what you have just been going over (i.e. what the reader was just reading) and clarifying what meaning it had and moving on. Many academics term these as ‘sign posts’, elements in your work where you close on point and head for another.

On the other hand, a conclusion appears at the end of your academic paper. It ‘wraps things up’ and concludes the arguments that you have put forward in your paper. This part is often the part that the reader remembers and so needs to be the best part of your paper. Do you go to a journal article, read the introduction and conclusion to see if it is any good, or worth reading? Well I know I definitely did in graduate school, so you need to allow your conclusion to make an impact on your reader.

Answer Questions
You want to answer a major question(s) in your conclusion – so what? (possibly the most fundamental question in academia) You need to show people that your paper was (or indeed is) meaningful when they read it, and is useful to them; whether this is due to it being a paper that they can quote from or whether it identify answers to certain questions for your academic marker.

Don’t just repeat
You don’t want to repeat and summarize your paper. You need to draw on the main points of your paper that are of interest and need to be highlighted. You will need to support your academic essay writing here by referring to examples and not leading them down the path to seem that the information contained is not just some random paper.

Direct your Readers
You will need to relate your conclusion to the reader so that they can understand your conclusion in a real world context. If you introduced the essay generally, then have gone specific during your writing, then consider writing specific and looking in general context how your conclusions can be concluded to a global stance.

Create meaning that is unique
Creating and having new meaning in academia means not that you need to have new information, or some ground breaking theory, but will entail you encapsulating your own ideas, with other author’s work and putting them into a new and understandable picture. In general, the summary of the paper and its meaning is worth more than any single part of the paper.



3 Strategies to success:

– Challenge the reader – Challenge the reader to understand what you have read and apply it to their own lives in some way

– Look to the future – By looking to the future in your conclusion you can direct your readers to look towards the future and allow them to think more globally about the impacts your conclusions could have on them

– Pose questions – Posing questions to your reader or the topic in general will allow their minds to wonder and allow your readers to gain a new perspective on the topic that your paper is about. It can also help when you are wanting to bring your main ideas about.

The key points in this article are helpful if you are just wanting a quick guide in your writing in academia, but you should remember to get your work checked by a professional proofreader.

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