english argument essay

Rather than simply summarizing your essay, your concluding paragraph should try to draw a conclusion based on what you argued.

Let’s assume the assignment was about people who cross gender boundaries by taking jobs dominated by a gender other than their own.

Typical concluding paragraph:

Men, more than women, struggle to cope with non-traditional gender roles. My friend Bob had a hard time when he decided to become a kindergarten teacher. People both at school and home gave him grief about his choice. He had to swallow his pride to do what he knew was right for him.

Although there is nothing wrong with that concluding paragraph, notice how each sentence could have easily been put in a body paragraph. In fact, each sentence just summarizes a body paragraph from the essay.

Let’s look at a concluding paragraph that draws a more philosophical conclusion about the same topic.

Concluding paragraph that draws a conclusion:

Men, more than women, struggle to cope with non-traditional gender roles. Society is slow to accept changes, especially when those changes are very personal ones. To its own detriment, society continues to see people in terms of their limitations rather than their possibilities.

See the difference? They both begin with a reiteration of the thesis. But the second one goes on to draw a conclusion about that argument, rather than just summarizing the essay.

Another method you can use to write an effective conclusion is to tie the final sentence of your concluding paragraph into a key term or idea you used throughout your essay or into the “creative title” you used.

For example, here is a conclusion from an essay entitled “Silent Women: Mothers and Daughters in Shakespeare’s Plays” that explores the missing mother and daughter relationships in Shakespeare’s works. (There are only six mother/daughter relationships throughout the thirty-eight known surviving plays, while there are twenty-five motherless daughters.):

Shakespeare’s plays focus on a power that was forbidden to women, a power that subverted them. The power of Shakespeare’s mothers and daughters is not in what they say, but in what they do not say. Their silence exposes problems within the patriarchal order that tries to control them. While mother and daughter relationships are noticeably missing from Shakespeare’s plays, their voices do not go unheard.

And the rest

is silence.

Notice how the key idea of silence is pulled in at the closing of the conclusion. The quote at the end (“And the rest/is silence.”) is a well-known excerpt from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This quote also ties in the idea of the significance of silence using Shakespeare’s own words.