The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

Designing essays | The beginning | The middle | The ending

The point of an ending | Closing the circle

In oratory, the peroration is the conclusion of a speech or discourse, where the speaker recapitulates his argument and presses it a final time with renewed vigor. The ending of a speech or an essay is not the time to raise a new substantive point: it is the time to remind, to reflect, and to send off the reader with a satisfied feeling. Somehow the very best endings possess a near-paradoxical quality—a sense of closure and completeness, and yet at the same time a suggestion of new open spaces to explore, armed with the ideas or information the essay has provided.

Over the years that I've read student essays, I've come up with a scale to rank endings. The worst essays just stop, vaulting the reader out onto the pavement like a car crash. Clearly in some of these cases the writer ran out of time or collapsed from exhaustion. Mediocre essays end with a more or less complete summary of the essay's argument, reminding the reader of key points. Good essays provide some sense of order and emphasis, moving from a mere summary list to a thoughtful recapitulation of the argument. And the best essays manage to look outward, drawing some larger conclusion, pointing to a significant implication or opportunity for further research.

Here's a weak ending. All it does is recapitulate each point the essay has made—it's a shopping list, not a conclusion:

Coriolanus has many personality traits, traits that explain his greatness as well as his downfall. His pride is well-earned, but is also the cause of his volatile relationship with the plebeians. Coriolanus has an ingenious military mind that is signaled by his glorious military career as well as his ineptitude as a politician. While his passion drives him toward superiority, it also causes him to lose control of his emotions. Finally, Coriolanus' compassionate side is illustrated by his relationship with his mother. However, Volumnia is able to manipulate her son as a result of his devotion. Coriolanus refuses to change his personality or his actions to please anyone but himself or his mother. His refusal comes under intense pressure, but is also endorsed by various characters throughout the play. In the end, the opinions of others become meaningless as Coriolanus is isolated from the country he fought so hard to defend.

What's missing is any real sense of summation, of a conclusion with heft. The last sentence, on Coriolanus' isolation, does gesture toward an interesting conclusion. But as written it rushes by too quickly, at the end of an overlong paragraph. Revision would seize on isolation as the key idea and build the paragraph's structure around it. Note that to do this the writer is going to have to think a lot more deeply about the topic and the argument. How do the various things mentioned here (and presumably discussed in the essay) tie to Coriolanus' isolation? Does Coriolanus grow more isolated over the course of the play? Why? (Note the unhelpful passive voice, is isolated, in the original—by now, we recognize this as a way of ducking the question of agency.

As typically happens, serious revision would lead here to rethinking, more thinking, and better thinking—maybe even, with luck and pluck, to a bit of wisdom.

One more weak ending:

Although Mark Antony seems like an unimportant character at the beginning of Julius Caesar, he develops into an extremely shrewd and powerful ruler who successfully utilizes Machiavellian strategies such as plotting political moves, gaining the acceptance of the common people and never deferring war.

As with the previous conclusion, this simply reiterates the points made in the essay. It lacks any larger vision or context; it does not broaden the essay's argument in any fashion. The revision tries to do that:

Mark Antony seems, at the beginning of Julius Caesar, a shallow and unimportant character. But by the end of the play he has been revealed as bold, shrewd, and ambitious, the play's most thoroughly Machiavellian character. Has he changed—or has Shakespeare merely allowed us to see beneath his mask? And was his love for Caesar genuine, or opportunistic? Shakespeare poses these questions about Antony without providing easy answers. Contemplating Antony, we come to see Julius Caesar as a deeply political play, a play that challenges and teaches us about the nature of politics and the temptations of power.

An excellent way to impart a sense of unity to an essay is to return at the end to a quotation, image, or statement that the essay began with. We can call it closing the circle. Done well, closing the circle conveys a sense of order, elegance, and thought that can make a reader smile with appreciation. Here's an example from another essay on Coriolanus. You might contrast it with the balder ending above:

BEGINNING

"Boy of tears," Aufidius taunts the Roman general Coriolanus near the end of Shakespeare's play (5.6.100), and the vehemence of Coriolanus' response suggests that Aufidius has hit the mark: there is something childish and sad about this fiercely proud warrior. . . .

ENDING

By the end, Coriolanus has thrown away not only his old identity but his new one as well. The "boy of tears" is left with only his immature fury and sullen isolation. His final act of mercy leads not to reconciliation but to further suffering, loss, and death.

Here's an example from an essay about a visit to an isolated Caribbean island. The writer begins with a little detail that captures the island's isolation and slow pace: a tardy mail boat, the only regular way to get on or off the island. Then, at the end, he comes back to the opening image:

BEGINNING

The mail boat should have been here hours ago. From my stool in Blind Sonny Lloyd's tiny waterfront bar, I can see past a stand of coconut palms to the wooden deck where the boat was to have picked me up. . . .

ENDING

As it turns out, I'm the only passenger on the mail boat this time. I stash my gear in a tiny cabin and later recall something Percy had told me after our lobster dive as we waded ashore under the lavish Bahamian sun. "Think about what kind of world we'd have if every kid on the planet could grow up on an island like this. There'd be no more violence, mon. No more hatred. Just love for everybody. A big, big love."

If only Ragged Island could gobble up the rest of the world, in other words, instead of sliding slowly in the opposite direction. We could all be stranded together. Marooned as a way of life. The world as one big island.

And we wouldn't need mail boats any more.

Mike Tidwell, "Found at Sea: Seeking an Obscure Haven in a Tourist-soaked Region, a Traveler Gets Himself Seriously Marooned on a Desert Island," Washington Post (February 28, 1999), E1.

As these examples suggest, a skilled writer doesn't merely repeat exactly what was said at the beginning. The trick is to echo the words or image one began with while adding some new twist or perspective to broaden the perspective.

Next: Evidence

Ending