How to Write a Conclusion

Writing essays is complicated work, and writing the ending to an essay is often the hardest part of that work. Endings are tough for several reasons. You may be tired from writing—or tired of what you have written. You may feel that you have made your point sufficiently and that no more needs to be said or can possibly be said. You may feel like just tying a bow around the essay and calling it good, but doing so is a mistake. The ending is your last chance to make an impression.

The ending is your last chance to make an impression.

And even if you try to write a powerful, substantive ending, there are plenty of ways to go wrong: repeating, equivocating, going off on a tangent, introducing a call to action from out of nowhere, marveling at the mysteries of the universe, tacking on an afterthought, and so on. I know because I’ve made all of these mistakes.

With so many ways to go wrong, planning the ending is too important to leave until the end. Consider the analogy of a road trip. If you are on the highway, you want to know where your exit is, slow down, signal and safely leave the highway. If you are driving too fast, or are in the wrong lane, or if the road is hazardous, you may be in for an accident. So think about the ending all through the essay, perhaps even finding ways to drop foreshadowing clues as you go, so the ending seems natural rather than forced.

Your ending should also match the purpose of the piece of writing. An opinion essay might end by reinforcing a particular course of action and its outcomes; a historical essay might connect the material discussed with what happened later or could happen in the future; satire might end with a wink to the reader; and analytic writing might offer readers a chance to test their thinking abilities. Even a listicle has a natural ending: the last item is often the most complex one—the item that the others in the list prepare the reader for.

The conclusion should be in proportion to the rest of the essay.

Besides matching the purpose of the writing, the ending should be in proportion to the rest of the work—probably between 10 to 15 percent of the content but no more than 20 and no less than 5. Finally, an ending should not be over-signaled with transitional phrases like “In conclusion,” or “to summarize” or even “so….” It should emerge naturally, almost inevitably from your points.

One of the best ways to refine conclusions is to notice how some writers you admire handle their endings. Take Sam Anderson’s “New York Magazine” review of “The Anthology of Rap,” in which he discusses rap as written poetry. His ending teases us with “And now to the ultimate...

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