The final paragraphs of an essay linger longest for readers, as in E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” from One Man’s Meat (Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 1941). White describes his return with his young son to a vacation spot he had loved as a child. As the essay ends in an unforgettable image, he realizes the inevitable passing of generations.
When the others went swimming my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.
White’s classic ending opens with a sentence that points back to the previous paragraph as it also looks ahead. Then White leads us quickly to his final, chilling insight. And then he stops.
It’s easy to say what not to do at the end of an essay: don’t leave your readers half expecting you to go on. Don’t restate all you’ve just said. Don’t introduce a brand-new topic that leads away from your point. And don’t signal that the end is near with an obvious phrase like “As I have said.” For some answers to “How do you write an ending, then?” try this checklist.
For more on punctuating quotations, see C3 in the Quick Editing Guide.
End with a Quotation.An apt quotation can neatly round out an essay, as literary critic Malcolm Cowley shows in The View from Eighty (New York: Viking, 1980), his discussion of the pitfalls and compensations of old age.
“Eighty years old!” the great Catholic poet Paul Claudel wrote in his journal. “No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them!”
State or Restate Your Thesis. In a sharp criticism of American schools, humorist Russell Baker in “School vs. Education” ends by stating his main point, that schools do not educate.
Afterward, the former student’s destiny fulfilled, his life rich with Oriental carpets, rare porcelain, and full bank accounts, he may one day find himself with the leisure and the inclination to open a book with a curious mind, and start to become educated.
End with a Brief Emphatic Sentence. For an essay that traces causes or effects, evaluates, or argues, a pointed concluding thought can reinforce your main idea. If you use Twitter, sending messages limited to 140 characters, apply those skills in a paragraph. Stick to academic language, but craft a concise, pointed sentence, maybe with a twist. In “Don’t Mess with Mother” (Newsweek 19 Sept. 2005), Anna Quindlen ends her essay about the environmental challenges of post-Katrina New Orleans this way:
New Orleans will be rebuilt, but rebuilt how? In the heedless, grasping fashion in which so much of this country has been built over the past fifty years, which has led to a continuous loop of floods, fires and filth in the air and water? Or could the new New Orleans be the first city of a new era, in which the demands of development and commerce are carefully balanced against the good of the land and, in the long run, the good of its people? We have been crummy stewards of the Earth, with a sense of knee-jerk entitlement that tells us there is always more where this came from.
There isn’t.
Stop When the Story Is Over. Even a quiet ending can be effective, as long as it signals clearly that the essay is finished. Journalist Martin Gansberg simply stops when the story is over in his true account of the fatal stabbing of a young woman, Kitty Genovese, in full view of residents of a Queens, New York, apartment house. The residents, unwilling to become involved, did nothing to interfere. Here is the last paragraph of “Thirty-eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police” (New York Times 17 Mar. 1964):
It was 4:25 A.M. when the ambulance arrived to take the body of Miss Genovese. It drove off. “Then,” a solemn police detective said, “the people came out.”