Your conclusion indicates that you have finished presenting your main points and are approaching the end of your speech. Plan your conclusion carefully—it’s your last chance to make sure your audience understands your main points. An effective conclusion signals the end of your speech, summarizes your main points, and has a memorable impact on your audience.

Signal the End. To signal that your speech is coming to a close, provide your listeners with a signpost or transition. Simple phrases like “In summary” or “Before I close” tell the audience that you’re about to end the speech. This transition also gives inattentive audience members one last chance to hear your main points.

Summarize Your Main Points. An age-old saying about how to make a speech is “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them.” In your conclusion, a quick review of your main points helps your audience remember and understand them. But remember that you’re only summarizing. Don’t repeat extensive details about your main points. Instead, express each main point in one sentence, and avoid introducing any new material in your conclusion.

Have a Memorable Impact. Just as you opened your speech with an attention-getting statement, your parting words should also be memorable. Some of the same strategies used to gain listeners’ attention also work for closing your speech—including asking questions, using quotations, or telling a brief story. Another possibility is to introduce your presentation by telling a story but leave the audience in suspense about its ending. You can then finish the story in the conclusion of your speech. A particularly effective way to end a speech is to refer to your opening statement—as Obama did in his speech on race relations when he concluded with a reference to the Constitution and “a more perfect union”: “And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.”