Transcript Lesson 20 Essentials Video: Introductions and Conclusions

JENNA: The introductions should be used to contextualize your thesis.

KENDRA It get the reader interested in why your question needs to be answered.

TOREY: A map of the essay, I think. You can tell what the essay is going to be about.

SALHUANA: So I use a funnel introduction so I can go—the general idea, I go to my thesis that I use to give you my introduction.

NICOLE: A lot of the times when you do write your introduction first, and then you go through your paper and you write your awesome body paragraphs and you have five or six body paragraphs, and then you have your conclusion at the end and you go back and read your paper, your introduction has nothing to do with what you just discussed in your body paragraphs. So in learning that lesson, I like to write my introduction last.

CATHERINE: There's a knot up here and that's your introduction. It's culminating of everything that's going on. It's right there. This is the cloth and this is its function. And then from there on out, you have six or seven strands and you're trying to weave them into this thing that's very tight and very useful. And so they come in and out of each other to be this cohesive piece.

MICHAEL: You get that end puzzle that you couldn't see before. That's where the real conclusion comes from.

CARA: In the conclusion, I want to, yes, summarize the points that I've made, but kind of suck out the essential power of the essay and put it in that conclusion. Because you want to leave people being like, wow, she had some awesome points. I totally see where she was coming from.

NICOLE: I learned this in school and I still look at it this way. I look at the conclusion as the "so what?"

NANAISSA: I'm only writing my own conclusion on what I learned in France, which is giving your answer and then the topic. Or if you want to be a little dramatic, give an opening. In French, you call it an ouverture. And make the person think about your essay even after they read it—finish with a tiny question. Not opening a new subject, but making the person want to think about what you're writing a little after they read your essay.

ALICE: People just end up copy-pasting their entire introduction paragraphs into the conclusion, changing a couple of words, and that's their conclusion paragraph. And it's not acceptable for me. I don't like that. I feel like it's useless.

CUYLER: I guess as I'm writing, I kind of keep my eye on the thesis, while I'm writing down the paper. And then once I hit the conclusion, I kind of have to make sure that all the threads wind themselves into the conclusion and match the thesis. And I feel like if you have to really, really work hard to make a conclusion, then there's something wrong either in the thesis or in the body of the paper, and you need to go back and figure out where it went wrong. Because I think the conclusions should come pretty naturally for a functioning paper.