(excerpted from:   D. Rosenwasser & J. Stephen, eds., Writing Analytically, New York:  Harcourt, Brace & Co.
1997.)
 

YOU HAVE PROBABLY NOTICED that it is difficult to read attentively and do something else at the same time. Imagine, for instance, trying to read a book while playing a guitar. Depending on the difficulty of the reading matter and your powers of concentration, you might not be able even to listen to a guitar and read at the same time. When you read, you enter a world created of written language--a textual world-and to varying degrees, you leave the world "out there." Even if other people are around, we all read in relative isolation; our attention is diverted from the social and physical world upon which the full range of our senses normally operates.

In this context, now place yourself in the position of the writer, rather than a reader, and consider the functions of the introduction and conclusion in a piece of writing. Your introduction takes the reader from a sensory world and submerges him or her into a textual one. And your conclusion returns the reader to his or her nonwritten reality. Introductions and conclusions mediate-they carry the reader from one way of being to another. They function as the most social parts of any written communication, the passageways in which you need to be most keenly aware of your reader.

At both sites, there is a lot at stake. The introduction gives the reader his or her first impression, and we all know how indelible that can be. The conclusion leaves the reader with a last-and potentially lasting-impression of the written world you have constructed.

Most of the difficulties in composing introductions and conclusions arise in deciding how you should deal with the thesis. How much of it should you put into the introduction? Should your conclusion summarize the thesis or extend it? To an extent, the formats and conventions of a particular academic discipline may arbitrate such questions. For that reason, this chapter relies heavily on Voices from Across the Curriculum. It also indicates basic strategies for constructing introductions and conclusions, and it targets some of the most common problems. As with other aspects of writing analytically, there are no absolute rules for writing introductions and conclusions, but insofar as disciplinary conventions permit, in introductions, play an ace but not your whole hand; and in conclusions, don't just summarize--culminate.
 
 

As its Latin roots suggest--intro, within + ducere. to lead or bring-an introduction brings the reader into a subject. Its length varies, depending on the scope of the writing project. An introduction may take a paragraph, a few paragraphs, a few pages, a chapter, or even a book. In most academic writing that you will do, one or two paragraphs is a standard length. In that space you should try to accomplish some or all of the following objectives:

-- Define your topic-the issue, question, or problem-and say why it matters.

-- Indicate your method of approach to the topic.

-- Provide necessary background or context.

-- Offer the working thesis (hypothesis) that your paper will develop.

An objective missing from this list that you might expect to find there is the admonition to engage the reader. Clearly, as our opening comments suggest, all introductions need to engage the reader, but this admonition is too often misinterpreted as a directive to be entertaining or cute. In academic writing, you don't need a gimmick to engage your readers; you can assume they care about the subject. You will engage them if you can articulate why your topic matters, doing so in terms of existing thinking in the field.

Especially in a first draft, the objectives listed above are not so easily achieved, which is why many writers defer writing a polished version of the introduction until they have completed at least one draft of the paper. At that point, you will usually have a clearer notion of why your subject matters and which aspect of your thesis to place first. Often the conclusion of a first draft becomes the introduction to the second draft. Other writers find that they can't proceed on a draft until they have arrived at an introduction that clearly defines the question or problem they plan to write about and its significance. For these writers, crafting an approach to the topic in the introduction is a key part of their planning phase, even though they also expect to revise the introduction based on what happens in their initial drafts.

In any case, the standard shape of an introduction is a funnel It starts wide, providing background and generalization, and then narrows the subject to a particular issue or topic. Here is a typical example from a student paper:

People have a way of making the most important obligations perfunctory, even trivial, by the steps they take to observe them. For many people, traditions and rituals become actuality; the form overshadows the substance. They lose sight of the underlying truths and what these should mean in their lives, and they tend to believe that observing the formalities fulfills their obligation. This is true of professional ethics as they relate to the practice of examining and reporting on financial data-the primary role of the auditor.

The paragraph begins with a generalization in the first sentence (about making even important obligations perfunctory) and funnels it down in the last sentence to a working thesis (about the ethics of an auditor's report on financial data).
 
 

A big problem with introductions lies with the amount of work that needs to get done in a limited space. To specify a thesis and locate it within a larger context, to suggest the plan or outline of the entire paper, and to negotiate first relations with a reader-that's a lot to pack into a paragraph or two. In deciding how much to introduce up front, you must make a series of difficult choices. We list some of these choices below, phrased as questions you can ask yourself

-- How much can I assume that my readers know about my subject?
 

-- Which parts of the research and/or the background are sufficiently pertinent to warrant inclusion?

-- How much of my thesis do I include, and which particular part or parts should I begin with?

-- What is the proper balance between background and foreground?

-- Which are the essential parts of my plan or road map to include?
 

TYPICAL PROBLEMS THAT ARE SYMPTOMS OF DOING Too MUCH

If you consider the questions above, you can avoid writing introductions that try to do too much. When you try to do too much-to turn an introduction into a miniature essay--a variety of problems can result. In this context, consider the three problems discussed below as symptoms of overcompression, telltale signs that you need to reconceive and probably reduce your introduction.
 

Digression

Digression results when you try to include too much background. If, for example, you plan to write about a recent innovation in video technology, you'll need to monitor the amount and kind of technical information you include in your opening paragraphs. You'll also want to avoid starting at a point that is too far away from your immediate concerns, as in "From the beginning of time humans have needed to communicate."

The standardized formats that govern procedural openings in some disciplines can help you to avoid digressing endlessly. There is a given sequence of steps to follow for a psychology report of an empirical study, for instance. Nonetheless, these disciplinary conventions still leave plenty of room for you to lose your focus. You still must choose which contexts are sufficiently relevant to be included up front.

In those disciplines that expect you to include context but do not stipulate a specific manner of doing so, the number of choices is greater, and so is the danger that you will get sidetracked into paragraphs of background that bury your thesis and frustrate your readers. One reason that many writers fall into this kind of digression in introductions is that they misjudge how much their audience needs to know. As a general rule in academic writing, don't assume that your readers know little or nothing about the subject. Instead, use the social potential of the introduction to negotiate your audience, setting up your relationship with your readers, and making clear what you are assuming they do and don't know.
 

Incoherence

Incoherence results when you try to preview too much of your conclusion. Incoherent introductions move in too many directions at once, usually because the writer is trying to conclude before going through the discussion that will make the conclusion comprehensible. The language you are compelled to use in such cases tends to be too dense, and the connections between the sentences tend to get left out, since there isn't enough room to include them. After having read the entire paper, your readers may be able to make sense of the introduction, but in that case, the introduction has not done its job.

The following introductory paragraph is incoherent, primarily because it tries to include too much. It neither adequately connects its ideas nor defines its terms.

Twinship is a symbol in many religious traditions. The significance of twinship will be discussed and explored in the Native American, Japanese Shinto, and Christian religions. Twinship can be either in opposing or common forces in the form of deities or mortals. There are several forms of twinship which show duality of order versus chaos, good versus evil, and creation versus destruction. The significance of twinship is to set moral codes for society and to explain the inexplicable.
 

Prejudgment

Prejudgment results when you appear to have already settled the question to be pursued in the rest of the paper. The problem here is logical. In the effort to preview your conclusion at the outset, you risk appearing to assume something as true that your paper will in fact need to test. In most papers in the humanities and social sciences, where the thesis evolves in specificity and complexity between the introduction and conclusion, writers and readers can find such assumptions prejudicial. Opening in this way, at any event, can make the rest of the paper seem redundant. Even in the sciences, where a concise statement of objectives, plan of attack, and hypothesis are usually required up front, a separate Results section is reserved for the conclusion.

The following introductory paragraph prejudges, which is to say that it offers a series of conclusions already assumed to be true without introducing the necessary background issues and questions that would allow the writer to adequately explore these conclusions.

Field hockey is a sport that can be played by either men or women. All sports should be made available for members of both sexes. As long as women are allowed to participate on male teams in sports such as football and wrestling, men should be allowed to participate on female teams in sports such as field hockey and lacrosse. If females press for and receive equal opportunity in all sports, then it is only fair that men be given the same opportunities. If women object to this type of equal opportunity, then they are promoting reverse discrimination.
 

OPENING GAMBITS: A FEW SOLUTIONS

The primary challenge in writing introductions, it should now be evident, lies in occupying the middle ground between overasserted prejudgment and irresolute avoidance of taking any position. There are a number of fairly common opening gambits that can help you to achieve an effective middle ground.
 

Gambit 1- Challenge a Commonly Held View

One of the best opening gambits is to challenge a commonly held view. This is what the economics professor quoted previously advises when he suggests that rather than announcing up front the answer to the question at which the paper arrives, you convey that "there may be some surprises in store as that common notion is examined." This move has several advantages. Most important, it provides you with a framework against which to reply; it allows you to begin by reacting, Moreover, since you are responding to a known position, you have a ready way of integrating context into your paper. As the professor notes of the FDR example, until we understand why it matters whether or not FDR was a Keynesian, it is pointless to answer the question.

Gambit 2: Begin with a Definition
 

In the case of the FDR example, a writer would p bably include another common introductory gambit, defining Keynesianism, Beginning with a definition is a reliable way to introduce a topic, so long as that definition has some significance for the discussion to follow. If the definition doesn't do any conceptual work in the introduction, the definition gambit becomes a pointless cliche.

Gambit 3: Offer a Working Hypothesis

But, you may be wondering, where is the thesis in the FDR example? As the economics professor suggests, you are often better off introducing a working hypothesis--an opening claim, sometimes in the form of a question, that stimulates the analytical process-instead of offering some full declaration of the conclusion. The introduction he envisions, for example, implies that the question of FDR's Keynesianism is not as simple as is commonly thought, further implying that the common association of "New Deal policies with general conceptions of Keynesianism" is, to some extent, false,

Gambit 4: Lead with Your Second-Best Example

Another versatile opening gambit, where disciplinary conventions allow, is to use your second best example to set up the issue or question that you later develop in depth with your best example. This gambit is especially useful in papers that proceed inductively on the strength of representative examples. As you are assembling evidence in the outlining and prewriting stage, in many cases you will accumulate a number of examples that illustrate the same basic point. For example, several battles might illustrate a particular general's military strategy; several primaries might exemplify how a particular candidate tailors his or her speeches to appeal to the religious right; several scenes might show how a particular playwright romanticizes the working class, and so on.

Save the best example to receive the most analytical attention in your paper, If you were to present this example in the introduction, you would risk making the rest of the essay vaguely repetitive. A quick close-up of another example will strengthen your argument or interpretation. By using a different example to raise the issues, you suggest that the phenomenon exemplified is not an isolated case and that the ma or example you will eventually concentrate upon is indeed representative.

What kind of example should you choose? By calling it "second best," we mean only to suggest that it should be another resonant instance of whatever issue or question you have chosen to focus upon. Given its location up front and its function to introduce the larger issues to which it points, you should handle it more simply than subsequent examples. That way your readers can get their bearings before you take them into a more in-depth analysis of your best example in the body of your paper.

Gambit 5: Exemplify the Topic with a Narrative

One more opening gambit that is common in the humanities and social sciences is the narrative opening. The narrative introduces a short, pertinent, and vivid story or anecdote that exemplifies a key aspect of your topic. Although generally not permissible in formal reports in the natural and social sciences, narrative openings are common across the curriculum in virtually all other kinds of writing. Here is an example from a student paper in psychology:

In the past fifteen years, issues surrounding AIDS have incited many people to examine their thoughts and feelings about homosexuality. As a result, instances of prejudice and discrimination towards gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have risen recently Herek, 1989). While some instances are sufficiently damaging to warrant criminal charges, other instances of prejudice occur everyday that are less serious. Nonetheless, they demonstrate a problem with our society that needs to be addressed. I witnessed one of these subtle demonstrations of prejudice in a social psychology class. The topic of the class was love and relationships, how they develop, endure, and deteriorate. Although the professor had not specifically stated it previously, the information being presented was relevant to homosexual relationships as well as heterosexual ones, At one point during her lecture, the professor was presenting an example using a hypothetical sorority member. The professor, in passing, referred to the sorority member's love relationship partner as a "she." This reference to a homosexual relationship did not seem intentional on the professor's part, However, many in the class noticed and reacted with silence at first, then glances at neighbors, which led finally to nervous laughter. After this disruption ended, a student explained to the professor what had been said that caused the disruption. And in response the professor promptly explained that the theories for love and relationships also applied to homosexual relationships.

In that moment of nervous laughter, many in the class displayed prejudice against homosexual relationships. In particular, they were displaying a commonly held belief that homosexual relationships are not founded on the same emotions, thoughts, and feelings that heterosexual relationships are. The main causes of prejudice displayed in class against homosexuality include social categorization and social learning.

As this introduction funnels down to its thesis, the readers have received a graphic sense of the issue the writer will now develop nonnarratively. Such nonnarrative treatment is necessary, for, by itself, anecdotal evidence can be seen as merely personal. Storytelling is suggestive but can never constitute proof, it needs to be corroborated. In the previous paragraph the writer has strengthened his credibility by focusing not on his personal responses but on the lesson to be drawn from his experience--a lesson that other people might also draw from it.

Like challenging a commonly held view or using a second best example, a narrative opening will also help to safeguard you from trying to do too much up front. All three gambits enable you to play an ace, establishing your authority with your reader, without having to play your whole hand. In other words, when disciplinary conventions permit, introductions set up a starting position; they don't necessarily offer a miniature version of the essay. As a general rule, an effective introduction will pose one problem and offer one enigmatic example-seeking in some way to engage the reader in the thought process that the writer is beginning to unfold. Vie introduction seeks to raise the issue, not settle it.
 
 

Like introductions, conclusions have a key social function: they escort the readers out of the paper, just as the introduction has brought them in. What do readers want as they leave the textual world you have taken them through? Although the form and length of the conclusion depend on the purpose and disciplinary conventions of the particular paper, it is possible to generalize a set of shared expectations for conclusions across the curriculum. In some combination most readers want three things: a judgment, a culmination, and a send-off.

Judgment

The conclusion is the site for final judgment on whatever question or issue or problem the paper has focused upon. In most cases, this judgment occurs in overt connection with the introduction, often repeating some of its key terms. However tentatively, the conclusion reconsiders the opening hypothesis, and, if possible, rules yea or nay. It also revisits explicitly the introductory claim for why the topic matters.

Culmination

More than simply summarizing what has preceded or reasserting your main point, the conclusion needs to culminate. The word culminate is derived from the Latin columen, meaning top or summit. To culminate is to reach the highest point, and it implies a mountain (in this case, of information and analysis) that you have scaled. When you culminate a paper in a conclusion, you bring things together and ascend to one cumulative statement of your thinking.

Send-off

The climactic effects of judgment and culmination provide the basis for the send-off. The send-off is both social and conceptual, a final opening out of the topic that leads the reader out of the paper with something further to think about.

As is suggested by most of the following Voices from Across the Curriculum, the conclusion needs to move beyond the close analysis of data that has occupied the body of the paper into a kind of speculation that the writer has earned the right to formulate.

Here is an example of a conclusion that contains a final judgment, a culmination, and a send-off. The paper, a student's account of what she learned about science from doing research in biology, opens with the claim that, to the apprentice, "science assumes an impressive air of complete reliability, especially to its distant human acquaintances." Having been attracted to science by the popular view that it proceeds infallibly, she arrives at quite a different final assessment:

All I truly know from my research is that the infinite number of factors that can cause an experiment to go wrong make tinkering a lab skill just as necessary as reading a buret. A scientist can eventually figure out a way to collect the data she wants if she has the patience to repeatedly recombine her materials and tools in slightly different ways. A researcher's success, then, often depends largely on her being lucky enough to locate, among all the possibilities, the one procedure that works.

Aided more by persistence and fortune than by formal training, I evolved a method that produced credible results. But, like the tests from which it derived, the success of that method is probably also highly specific to a certain experimental environment and so is valid only for research involving borosilicate melts treated with hydrofluoric and boric acids. I've discovered a principle, but it's hardly a universal one: reality is too complex to allow much scientific generalization. Science may appear to sit firmly on all- encom passing truths, but the bulk of its weight actually rests on countless little rules tailored for particular situations.

This writer deftly inter-weaves the original claim from her introduction-that science assumes an impressive air of complete reliability "-into a final judgment of her topic, delivered in the last sentence. This judgment is also a culmination, as it moves from her account of doing borosilicate melts to the small but acute generalization that "little rules tailored for particular situations," rather than "allencompassing truths," are the mainstay of scientific research. Notice that a culmination does not need to make a grand claim in order to be effective. In fact, the relative smallness of the final claim, especially in contrast to the sweeping introductory position about scientific infallibility, ultimately provides a send-off made effective by its unexpected understatement.

There is striking overlap in the advice these cross-disciplinary "Voices" offer. All caution that the conclusion should provide more than a restatement of what you've already said. All suggest that the conclusion should, in effect, serve as the introduction to some "larger mental paper out there" (as one professor puts it), beyond the confines of your own paper. By consensus, the professors make three recommendations for conclusions:

1. Pursue implications. Reason inductively from your particular study to consider broader issues, such as the study's practical consequences or applications, or future-oriented issues, such as avenues for further research. To unfold implications in this way is to broaden the view from the here-and-now of your paper by looking outward to the wider world and forward to the future.

2. Come full circle. Unify your paper by interpreting the results of your analysis in light of the context you established in your introduction.

3. Identify limitations. Acknowledge restrictions of method or focus in your analysis, and qualify your conclusion (and its implications) accordingly.

Consider how the following example does the three things that the professors have recommended: unfolds implications, comes full circle, and limits claims. The example provides the concluding paragraphs to the paper from which we earlier quoted the introduction as an example of a narrative opening. That opening anecdote, you may recall, introduced the problems of social categorization and social learning as causes of homophobia in the academic environment.

There are many other instances of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination against homosexuals. These range from beliefs that homosexual partners cannot be adequate parents, to exclusion from the military, to bias (hate) crimes resulting in murder. But in recent decades, attempts have been made to help end these discriminations. One of the first occurred in 1973 when the American Psychological Association changed its policy so that homosexuals were no longer regarded as mentally ill (Melton, 1989). Thus the stigma that homosexuals were not able to fully contribute to society was partially lifted.

Other ways that have been suggested to reduce prejudice regarding homosexuals include increasing intergroup contact. In this way, each group may come to recognize similarities and encounter counter-stereotypical information. Herek (1989) also suggests that education in elementary through high schools about diversity and tolerance of it, for students as well as teachers, may help prevent stereotypes, prejudice, and hate crimes. And if they are made aware of their schemas and stereotypes, people may consider information they would have ignored based on their schemas We may never be able to eliminate the process of social categorization, but perhaps we may be able to teach that all out-groups are not necessarily "bad."

In the first paragraph the writer adeptly shifts direction--"But in recent decades"-from cataloguing the range of homophobic responses to assessing the changes in the overall climate. In so doing, he comes full circle, returning implicitly to the original problem phrased in the introduction and referring again to the source (Herek) used there, but now in the context of what can be done to redress the problem. Note as well how carefully he has qualified the final summary of evidence, laying the foundation for the concluding claim: the stigma "was partially lifted" in 1973; "We may never be able to eliminate ... but perhaps we may be able to teach"; and so forth (our italics). As a result of this careful qualification, the implications of the study are not overstated but modestly offered as a quiet hope.
 

SOLVING TYPICAL PROBLEMS IN CONCLUSIONS

The primary challenge in writing conclusions, it should now be evident, lies in finding a way to culminate your analysis without claiming either too little or too much. There are a number of fairly common problems to guard against if you are to avoid either of these two extremes.

Redundancy

In Chapter 3, "Questions of Format," we lampooned an exaggerated example of the five-paragraph form for constructing its conclusion by stating "Thus, we see" and then repeating the introduction verbatim. The result is redundancy- As you've seen, it's a good idea to refer back to the opening, but don't reinsert it mechanically. Instead, reevaluate what you said there in light of where you've ended up, repeating only key words or phrases from the introduction. This kind of selective repetition is a desirable way of achieving unity and will keep you from either of two opposite mistakes-either repeating too much or bringing up a totally new point in the conclusion.

Raising a Totally New Point

Raising a totally new point can distract or bewilder a reader. This problem often arises out of a writer's praiseworthy desire to avoid repetition. As a rule, you can guard against the problem by making sure that you have clearly expressed the conceptual link between your central conclusion and any implications you may draw. An implication is not a totally new point but one that follows from the position you have been analyzing.

Similarly, although a capping judgment or send-off may appear for the first time in your concluding paragraph, it should have been anticipated by the body of your paper. Conclusions often indicate where you think you (or an interested reader) may need to go next, but you don't actually go there. In a paper on the economist Milton Friedman, for example, if you think that another economist offers a useful way of critiquing him, you probably should not introduce this person for the first time in your conclusion.

Overstatement

Many writers are confused over how much they should claim in their conclusion. Out of the understandable desire for a grand culmination, writers sometimes overstate the case; that is, they assert more than their evidence has proven, or even suggested. Must a conclusion arrive at some comprehensive and final answer to the question that your paper has analyzed? Depending on the question and the disciplinary conventions, you may need to come down exclusively on one side or another. In a great many cases, however, the answers with which you conclude can be more moderate and modest. Especially in the humanities, good analytical writing seeks to unfold successive layers of implication, so it's not even reasonable for you to expect neat closure. In such cases, you are usually better off qualifying your final judgment, drawing the line at a point of relative stability.

Anticlimax

It makes a difference precisely where in the final paragraph(s) you qualify your concluding claim. The end of the conclusion is a "charged" site, since it gives the reader a last impression of your paper. If you end with a concession, on a note that detracts from your fundamental thesis, you risk leaving the reader unsettled and, possibly, confused. The term for this kind of letdown from the significant to the inconsequential is anticlimax. In most cases, you will flub the send-off if you depart the paper on an anticlimax.

There are many forms of anticlimax besides ending with a concession. If your conclusion peters out in a random list or an apparent afterthought or a lastminute qualification of your claims, the effect is anticlimactic. And for many readers, if your final answer comes from quoting an authority in place of establishing your own, that too is an anticlimax.

At the beginning of this chapter we suggested that a useful rule for introductions was to play an ace but not your whole hand. In the context of this card-game analogy, it is similarly effective to save an ace for the conclusion. In most cases, this high card will provide an answer to some culminating "so what?" question--a last view of the implications or consequences of your analysis.
 

GUIDELINES FOR INTRODUCTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Introductions

1 . Disciplinary conventions permitting, the introduction seeks to raise the issue, not settle it.

2. Engage your readers by articulating why, in terms of existing thinking on the subject, your topic matters. Avoid "catchy" introductory gimmicks in academic writing.

3. Always introduce a working (hypo)thesis, frame it with background or other context, and indicate your method or angle of approach. Cite relevant sources.

4. Especially in longer papers, you can use a procedural opening to forecast the organization clearly, but don't let it distract you from also stating your claim.

5. Don't try to do too much. Offer only the most relevant context, the most essential parts of your road map, and (disciplinary conventions permitting) a first rather than last claim.

6. Experiment with opening gambits. Challenge a common view, use your second best example to set up the issue, or exemplify the problem with a narrative opening (disciplinary conventions permitting).

Conclusions

7. Don't just summarize; culminate. Offer your most qualified statement of the thesis or your final judgment on the question posed in the introduction.

8. Come full circle. Revisit the introductory hypothesis and context. This strategy will unify your paper and help locate it within scholarly conversation on your topic.

9. Acknowledge the limitations of your discussion or study. Don't assert more than your evidence has established.

10. Give your conclusion a send-off. Leave the reader with implications or speculations to think about further. Avoid closing the conclusion with a concession.

11. Let your conclusion gradually escort the reader out of the paper. Like the introduction, it is a social site, so leave the reader with a positive last impression.