Student Handouts
Conclusions
Your conclusion should neither be a summary nor a mere restatement of your thesis. Instead, it must go beyond the thesis to reach a judgment, to express your approval of one side of an issue, to discuss your findings and their implications, or to offer directives. To put it succinctly, you should say something worthwhile. After all, your readers have stayed with you through eight or nine pages; you owe them a concluding statement. The following are just some ways to write effective conclusions.
- Restate the thesis and reach beyond it with a recommendation, an evaluation, a prediction, or a question.
- Close with an effective quotation.
- Return the focus of a literary study to the author.
- Offer a directive or solution.
- Compare past to present.
Restate the thesis and reach beyond it with a recommendation, an evaluation, a prediction, or a question.
Let
us face the problem straight on and try to erase it in the best
way we can rather than throw up our hands and say that all we
can do is help the victims and merely label the abuser a "black
sheep." Let us look to the parent or guardian as a victim as well
and try, difficult though it may be, to show love, warmth, and
concern to these people who too often silently cry out of loneliness,
isolation, and alienation. Their violent beating of a child, though
we cannot condone it, may be a cry for help. People, whether young
or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, need love and the warmth
that family life brings. Unfortunately, those children who lack
love fall victims to hostile, aggressive physical abuse and probably,
because they cannot give love, grow up to be abusers themselves.
Close with an effective quotation.
Billy Budd, forced to leave the Rights of Man, goes aboard the Bellipotent where law, not morality, is supreme. His death is an image of the crucifixion, but the image is not one of hope. William Braswell best summarizes the mystery of the novel by suggesting that the crucifixion, for Melville, "had long been an image of human life, more suggestive of man's suffering than of man's hope" (146).
Return the focus of a literary study to the author.
By
her characterization of Walter, Lorraine Hansberry has raised
the black male above the typical stereotype. Walter is not a social
problem, a mere victim of matriarchy. Rather, Hansberry creates
a character who breaks out of the traditional sociological image
that dehumanizes the black male. Creating a character who struggles
with his fate and rises above it, Hansberry has elevated the black
male. As James Baldwin puts it, "Time has made some changes in
the Negro face" (24).
Offer a directive or solution.
The four points above demonstrate a central issue: the troubled parents who were victims in their own right and those who are victimized by circumstances today must be helped to recognize their real potential as human beings. The responsibility falls on all health professionals to provide the necessary treatment. Major cities across the nation and many rural communities are establishing child abuse centers and parental self-help groups. A few of the most successful community involvement programs are the Child Abuse Prevention Center in Toledo, the Johnson County Coalition for Prevention of Child Abuse in Kansas City, and the Council for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect in Seattle. More cities should establish such programs.
Compare past to present.
In the traditional patriarchal family, the child was legal property of the parents. But the idea that children are the property of the parents and, therefore, may receive whatever punishment seems necessary, no longer holds true. Social organizations and governmental agencies now help young victims in their search for preventive measures. Unlike in the past, children today have rights too!
From: Writing Research Papers: A Complete Guide, James Lester, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1984.