The Profound Sign-off

Still thinking about conclusions, I starting thinking about The Matrix, which tickles me and annoys me a bit.

It tickles me for for galvanizing a generation of pale guys to go out and buy long leather coats, adopt a slightly creepy, deadpan vernacular and walk around with knitted brows looking like they are cogitating the nature of Choice. (Aside: anyone else notice they always carry thin HMV bags? What is in those bags?) It annoys me for the final scene of the first film: I think it was rather overindulgent of the Wachowskis. Listen to it here (may not work on Internet Explorer because it's lame; use Firefox):



Neo's frothy spiel to the Matrix (or whatever he is talking to, himself most probably) and his extravagant 'Superman thing', as Link later dubs it, set against Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up, captures a tendency in writing, speeches and film to shoehorn some mawkish wider meaning into the end of the script and finish on a big, splashy note.

US TV series are especially guilty of this, typically signing off with some life-affirming message or manifesto for making the world a better place. Something like, 'I guess the thing about identity these days is [insert your own pseudo-profound statement].'

Back to academia though. Whether or not this need to inject some wider meaning into conclusions is a product of our reading and viewing diets or whether it's from something else, it has no place in your essay's conclusion. Try and purge yourself of the temptation to imbue your final sentence with a fat dollop of real-world import.

Your final sentence in your essay should be a place for you to pithily state your answer to the question, so it is ringing in the ears of the marker as she finalises your mark. It is not the place for your personal manifesto.

Don't do a Neo and dip into the platitudes when you finish up; just answer the question.

Conclusions and Balloons

I have blogged about getting the flavour of your introduction right to impress your reader. Now it's time to think about how to finish off.

For this we are going to employ the use of some helium balloons for the mother of all contrived analogies. What we want to do is make the marker take off like this at the end of the essay:

How do we do it? What we will need are lots of well-inflated balloons all tied together. The balloons are the points in your essay. The lift they give is the force of your argument. If they don't have anything in them they ain't gonna fly. So, in your essay make sure all your points are supported by empirical reference or logic, and there are lots of them.

Now, if you hand someone a load of balloons that aren't bound together what you have is minor disappointment and a load of wasted balloons that are probably going to confuse a flock of birds. You might as well not have bothered inflating them. In other words, if your points aren't nicely drawn together at the end you aren't going to get the desired effect. The conclusion is the place to tie up all the balloons and announce the lift off.

What follows is the crudest possible way of constructing an essay. It a guideline not a rule. Don't follow it to the letter but use it to see how you can go about constructing your conclusion by drawing on the points you have made earlier.

Intro
-Intro, issue, route, destination

Para 1
-Point 1
-Summarise paragraph point 1 and relate back to Q (P1P)
Para 2
-Point 2
-Summarise paragraph point 2 and relate back to Q (P2P)
Para 3
-Point 3.
-Summarise paragraph point 3 and relate back to Q (P3P)
Para 4
-Point 4
-Summarise paragraph point 4 and related back to Q (P4P)

Conclusion
-Summarise the issue outlined at start
-P1P
-P2P
-P3P
-P4P
-Drumroll...and explicit answer to main question which will be ringing in marker's ears as they finalise your mark.

So for conclusions remember this: tie up your balloons and announce lift off!