A fully developed closure for an essay might include most or all of the following elements:

• Summary and critique
• Recommendations
• A new perspective
• A new context for considering the central question

A summary near the end of an essay can be useful, but it can also be an anticlimax that freezes your ideas—especially if it merely repeats sentences or phrases that have already appeared in the introduction or elsewhere in the essay. Consider:

• Why are you summarizing? A summary is not an end in itself; it pulls key ideas together as you prepare for a final analytical push.

• Collect the news from your analysis. This might mean concentrating on the quirky, the strange, the unexpected aspects of your argument. The news at the end should arise from your discovery process as you work through the argument.

• You might approach the summary as a catalog of new information derived from the comparisons you have made or the interactions you have analyzed—a catalog of how the ideas in your essay have developed since page 1.

Think of your ending as a new beginning. Once you’ve summarized, you might have recommendations about how the issues you’re addressing could be further explored. You might have reached a new perspective on the question or discovered a new context to which your thesis applies.

• Now that you’re closing: what do you really think your essay is all about? What have you not been saying because it seemed too risky, but your hunches keep pointing you in that direction?

• Now that you’ve been deductive and inductive, be abductive. That is: if you treat your now fully developed thesis as a theory, what are other situations to which your theory applies, and how?

• What are the new questions? Pose them even if you can’t answer them.

• Drop lots of shoes. Your ending shouldn’t be just "another shoe" that you’ve been saving to drop. Imagine that your essay is a detective story. Instead of revealing whodunnit on the last page, you solve the mystery earlier—and then proceed to reveal the larger mystery surrounding the crime.

• End strong. The last sentence doesn’t need to solve everything, it doesn’t need to state an incontestable truth or a global generalization. But it needs to be strong, clear, and true to your engagement with the ideas in your essay.

- Janet Gray