Elaboration

The elaboration of the concluding paragraph develops what has been left open in the topic sentence. Particularly after a set of body paragraphs in which you have, perhaps somewhat coolly, presented the two sides of some debate, the conclusion proper offers you the opportunity to present a personal viewpoint. You can here emerge from behind the screens of scholarly distance to express your own preference. You can feel free to work out the implications of your involvement and that viewpoint for the subject you have been treating. This will very often lead you to propose certain courses of action: you may call for law reform, for the voicing of protest, for a change of attitude, for the abandonment of a particular theoretical stance. In this way, your argument may lead to a number of suggestions, just as many reports and policy documents end with a list of recommendations for future policy. But again, your display of involvement and commitment should not descend into the I and you of conversational interaction. We would thus advise against such formulations as:

*I think that you improve the relationship between schoolteacher and parents if you have more parents' evenings.

Preferring a shrewd use of modals (here can) and passives (be improved):

The relationship between schoolteacher and parents can be improved with more parents' evenings.

It will not always be appropriate, or in keeping with your wishes, to use the elaboration of the final paragraph for the expression of personal preferences. What is vital, however, is that this part of your text should strike your reader as a dynamic continuation of what has preceded: dynamic in the sense that it offers new material, extending the forward thrust of the body paragraphs and expanding on what has been said there; and a continuation in the sense that it is does not introduce a radically different topic. It is important that the conclusion should in no way undermine the content of the text proper. If you find yourself impelled to write something like the following, then your text as a whole must have been ill-conceived, and it is time to go right back to the planning stage again!

*Much of what has been said above is irrelevant, since it failed to pay any attention to the really important question of...

Nor should the conclusion contain information that is radically new with respect to what has preceded. Thus you must not disorient your reader in the concluding paragraph with statements like the following:

*The figures presented above have been superseded by new statistics, which show that the trend we observed has in fact been reversed.

You are not writing a thriller: this is not the place for a ‘sting in the tail'. Remember above all that the word conclusion has two senses, ‘ending' an ‘deduction, judgment, opinion'. It is definitely the second sense that should be uppermost in your mind as you plan, write and edit the final paragraph of your text. If it seems appropriate to summarize the main points of the preceding argument, make sure that you do not leave it at that: it is much more effective if you draw deductions from what you have found, if you pass judgement, if you express an opinion. In principle, using the same reference works and other sources of information, two writes could well come up with the same body (in actual practice, we often find that different students independently marshal arguments pro and con in parallel ways); where they will differ is in the conclusions that they draw from the information that has been assembled, because each writer brings his own particular perspective to bear on the matter at hand.

If the introduction can be seen as a matter of ‘leading the reader INto' the subject at hand (and this is what introduction etymologically means), and the body is above all concerned with keeping the reader INvolved with (etymologically ‘wrapped up in') the subject, the fundamental aim of the conclusion is to lead the reader OUT again, stimulated and changed by the experience of having entered, witnessed and left the textual world that the writer has created for him. It is for this reason that the elaboration of the concluding paragraph will frequently be oriented not so much to the world of ideas as to the world of action. The reader will be looking for practical implications of theoretical insights, lessons to be drawn from past errors, suggestions for the elimination of present abuses; if he feels that these follow naturally from a well-presented argument in the body paragraphs, he is likely to be convinced, and possibly even affected in his everyday actions.