Conclusion Guidelines

After reading about conclusions in the Activity titled “Conclusion,” find a scholarly article and pay particular attention to its conclusion. Does it meet the requirements of a conclusion according to this Activity? Why or why not? Please provide examples. What steps would you take to improve the conclusion?

Conclusions generally consist of a restatement of your thesis or main idea and a
reminder of your work’s significance. Recall that your introductions typically began at
a more general level than your research’s limited topic but that you moved from that
general, attention-grabbing information, to a specific research question. Your
conclusion generally moves in the reverse direction, beginning with the specific
points of your argument, and then transitions back out to the larger topic.
In transitioning to the larger stakes of your project, you might address what further
research is necessary for a fuller answer to your research question or opposing
viewpoints that you do not otherwise address. However, if you use either of these
methods for transitioning in your conclusion to the broader topic your research
informs, be sure to do so strategically. What you want to avoid is raising any new
topics or new questions that your work does not address, as doing so will make your
research seem unfinished.
The conclusion of your literature review must achieve closure, a sense that the
project is finished. In literature, closure is often achieved through repetition, and so
repeating our thesis statements, in new words of course, helps the reader begin to
feel closure. The power of repetition to make us feel something is done is most
apparent in short poems. Think of something like “Roses are red, violets are blue.
Here is a valentine, because I love you.” The rhyme of blue and you create an aural
repetition that confers a sense of closure. Compare the sense of ending you have at
the final “you” to the suspended feeling after “valentine.” Another example of
repetition creating a sense of closure is in closing potentially infinite lists. Think, for
example, of a list like “I hate you because…” This list could include almost any
attribute. “I hate you because you are tall, because you made fun of my brother,
because you are a phony, etc.” If you append a sentence at the end like, “And that is
why I hate you,” our expectation becomes that no more items will follow, even
though nothing logically demands that the list closed. Part of what confers closure in
this longer list is the break that the return to the big picture enacts. Similarly, with
your literature review, and because the conclusion follows the last paragraph of your
body in which you describe your research and delve into details, returning to the
bigger stakes of your research question will seem like a noticeable change in topic.
This, in turn, breaks the expectation for additional body paragraphs.