Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [237]
Anticlimax
The end of the conclusion is a “charged” site because it gives the reader a last impression of your paper. If you end with a concession—an acknowledgement of a rival position at odds with your thesis—you risk leaving the reader unsettled and possibly confused. The term for this kind of letdown 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 last-minute 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 section, we suggested that a useful rule for the introduction is 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.
* * *
Try This 16.1: Analyze Paired Introductions and Conclusions
The best way to learn about introductions and conclusions is to study them separated out from the larger articles or essays they frame. Once they are isolated in this way, you can begin to focus on the form, noticing how the introductions raise an issue, provide minimal context, and perhaps start down a particular thesis path. And looking at the paired conclusion, you can see where each writer ends up and how he or she gets us there, culminating the journey in the context of its beginning.
What follows are eight introductions paired with their conclusions, taken from various kinds of published writing. Study the pairings to identify how particular sentences function, in terms of both organization and rhetoric. The following questions should help.
Where in each of the introductions does the working thesis or other indication of the paper’s probable direction appear?
Which words and sentences in each of the conclusions bring the paper full circle?
What seems to have happened to the paper’s opening claims by the time the writer arrives at his or her conclusion?
What strategies does each writer use to begin and end his or her writing?
Where and how do the concluding paragraphs seem to culminate and provide readers with some kind of send-off?
Your goal is to get in the practice of noticing what writers do in their introductions and conclusions.
1. From Jessica Love, “They Get to Me” in The American Scholar (July 2, 2010). [http://www.theamericanscholar.org/they-get-to-me/]
Introduction:
I used to be a normal psycholinguistics graduate student. I wanted to study how the mind parses improbable metaphors, unintelligible accents, and quirky syntax. Sexy things. Things that would play out well at parties. I imagined myself magnanimously explaining how sentences like “The bartender served the bourbon fell down the stairs” were truly grammatical. I imagined myself dropping newspaper headlines like “Iraqi Head Seeks Arms” into conversations with beautiful people. I would defend Internet chatroom slang on local radio. I would exchange holiday cards with Steven Pinker.
But something has happened. I am in my third year of graduate school, and I have fallen in love. I have fallen for pronouns. It’s hard to shut me up about them.
Conclusion:
Lucky for me, there are plenty of pronouns in need of more study— the diectics (here, there), the reflexives (himself, themselves), the interrogatives (who, what), the possessives