Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [238]
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.
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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 (his, mine), the indefinites (somebody, anything)—each with its own relatively unexamined life. Or, for the freshest pronoun around, I could always coin one myself.
In Baltimore, some teenagers already have: their candidate, yo, is a new gender-neutral third-person personal pronoun. As in Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt or Yo sucks at magic tricks. If yo sticks around—and if it spreads—maybe we can put the ever-awkward he or she to rest forever. And what would that mean? What consequences could that have for how we think about our world? Empirical question. Send in the psycholinguists.
2. From “Energy in the European Union, Gas Wars” in The Economist 390.8613 (January 10, 2009). (The Economist does not publish the names of the authors of its articles.)
Introduction:
A gas row between Russia and Ukraine has become a Christmas ritual. That may explain why,