Teaching Analytical Writing: Introductions and Conclusions

Now that I’ve described the way I teach students to write the core of an essay (by constructing an essay skeleton and crafting TIQA paragraphs), I’m ready to discuss the last two essay elements: the introduction and conclusion.

Yes, the introduction comes first, and when I write my own essays, I usually start with it. But when students are learning how to write essays, I find that it works best to tackle the introduction after the body of the essay is mostly set. That way, students don’t spend time getting the introduction just right and then have to scrap it if their main points change or if they end up repeating something from the introduction in one of their body paragraphs.

The way I see it, a traditional analytical introduction has four main elements: a hook, a link, some summary, and the thesis. Here’s a document I use to teach introductions. It offers more details about these four elements, breaks down some possible types of hooks, and provides an example introduction. Students can think of the introduction as an inverted triangle with the point at the bottom; it starts somewhat general and relatable and then gets more specific.

The conclusion, on the other hand, is shaped like a right-side-up triangle with the point at the top. (Although not literally, of course. Literally it’s just shaped like yet another blocky paragraph.) Conclusions are tricky because it’s boring if they merely repeat the points of the essay without offering anything new, but it’s confusing if they suddenly bring up a brand new topic.

Here’s a document that offers some specific strategies for conclusions and includes an example conclusion. Basically, a conclusion should recap the essay’s main ideas, ideally without being too repetitive, and then it should consider the broader implications of the essay’s topic, come to some kind of evaluation of the literary work in question, and/or come full-circle back to the hook.

When I talk to students about structuring traditional, five-paragraph-or-so analytical essays, I often think back to when I was in middle school, when we were working on essays and a classmate said he already knew how to write them. “You just tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; then you tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em; then you tell ‘em what you told ‘em,” he announced.

Oversimplified? Definitely. But in a very basic sense, my middle school classmate was mostly correct. The introduction “tells ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em.” The body paragraphs “tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em.” The conclusion “tells ‘em what you told ‘em.” The other resources I’ve provided here offer some concrete information about how to do all that telling, and I hope they’ve been helpful! I’ll have one more installment of this series: a post that asks the question “Why teach analytical writing?” and summarizes my thoughts.