Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [234]
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 major example you will eventually concentrate on is indeed representative.
Exemplify the Topic with a Narrative
An occasional gambit in the humanities and social sciences, the narrative opening introduces a short, pertinent, and vivid story or anecdote that exemplifies a key aspect of a topic. Although generally not permissible in the formal reports assigned in the natural and social sciences, narrative openings turn up in virtually all other kinds of writing across the curriculum.
As the introduction funnels to its thesis, the readers receive a graphic sense of the issue that the writer will now develop nonnarratively. Nonnarrative treatment is necessary because by itself anecdotal evidence can be seen as merely personal. Storytelling is suggestive but usually does not constitute sufficient proof; it needs to be corroborated.
WHAT CONCLUSIONS DO: THE FINAL “SO WHAT?”
Like the introduction, the conclusion has a key social function: it escorts the readers out of the paper, just as the introduction has escorted them in. What do readers want as they leave the textual world you have taken them through? The concluding paragraph presents the paper’s final “So what?”
Implicit here is the notion that conclusions always state (or restate) the thesis in its most fully evolved form. (See Chapter 11.) In addition, the conclusion usually makes all of the following moves:
It comes full circle. That is, it creates a sense of closure by revisiting the way the paper began. Often, it returns to some key phrase from the context established in the introduction and updates it.
It pursues implications. That is, it reasons from the particular focus of the essay to 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 the paper by looking outward to the wider world and forward to the future.
It identifies limitations. That is, it acknowledges restrictions of method or focus in the analysis, and qualifies the conclusion (and its implications) accordingly.
These moves are quite literally movements—they take the thinking in the essay, and the readers with it, both backward and forward. The backward thrust we call culmination; the forward thrust we call send-off.
When you culminate a paper, you bring together things you have already said, establishing their connection and ascending to one final statement of your thinking. 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) you have scaled.
The climactic effects of culmination provide the basis for the send-off. The send-off is both social and conceptual, a final opening outward of the topic that leads the reader out of the paper with something further to think about. Here, the thinking moves 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. Simply put, you culminate with the best statement of your big idea, and your send-off gets you and the reader out of the paper.
Beyond Restatement: Two Professors Speak
The professors in the following Voices from Across the Curriculum suggest ways of ending on a note of expanded implication, bringing the paper’s more focused analysis to a larger perspective.