How to Write the Conclusion of an Essay

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk about writing a conclusion of an essay. The conclusion, next to your introduction is the most important part of your essay, while the body of your essay is really the bulk. The intro and conclusion must connect and must be good in order for you really to receive and A, as far as I'm considered. So, let's go ahead and look at the intro and a conclusion of an essay that I wrote that I put back to back. A lot of times people will tell you to just reiterate your entire paper in your conclusion. I'm sort of against this idea that you do that. What you do need to do is you need to sort of sum up in about a sentence what you have said in the essay. But I believe that you should draw from your introduction, that you should go back to the questions you posed there and all the information that you worked on in the introduction. So, for example, In North by Northwest and Rebeca, we see the circle on walls, faces and bodies but we also observe the circle in a structural level. So this paper is about circle motifs in Hitchcock's films. And this is from my intro paragraph. In my conclusion paragraph, I go ahead and I mention the circles again, that Rebeca ends where it began, structuring the film in a perfect circle. But by the end of the conclusion I decide to bring up a new point and say that the characters are going to be entwined in the circle of marriage, something I have not brought up in the rest of the paper. So therefore, I'm bringing in this new idea. I believe very firmly that a conclusion to an essay has to lead to something else; that you're not the only person who's ever going to write about this subject, in that by concluding your essay you're also leading in to possible other ideas that may be written on later. So, be humble in your conclusion. Realize that you haven't figured everything out. But the last sentence of this essay that I wrote is, that is another subject entirely. And so I give way to someone who's going to write you know, after me. I believe that you should, you should sum everything up in about a sentence, possibly. But don't be afraid to introduce things that you didn't think about in the essay, that you did not address; things that are still left open. And I think that way you'll have an essay that is much more self aware deserving of an A."