In conclusion, slavery was wrong...

There is a sentence I have read so many times it has lost all meaning.

“In conclusion, as I have shown above…”

What follows is always a list of the same arguments they just finished presenting, the title of the prompt, or worse: brand new information they never mentioned before. It leaves you feeling baited, or hanging, sometimes confused.

Some essays have the opposite problem. They are too conclusionary. Jumping to the verdict before the argument has been built. Stating the outcome before earning it.

I recognise that student too. They know what they think. They write the ending first, in their head, and then fill in the body as supporting material. The conclusion feels strong to them because the conviction is genuine. But the reader hasn’t been taken there yet. The argument was never constructed, only asserted.

Both failure modes come from the same misunderstanding: the conclusion is treated as a location in the essay rather than a function. You don’t write a conclusion because you’ve reached the end of the essay. You write it because the argument is now complete, and the reader needs to feel that completion.

This shows up in my markings more than any other cohesion and coherence (CC) issue for IELTS grading. Students who can sustain a clear argument for four paragraphs will, reliably, walk off a cliff on the fifth. The body has momentum. The conclusion has a different job, and most students have never been told what that job is.

Here is what I tell them it needs to do: Compress & Punch!

First: a compression. The argument in its shortest form, showing the reader the shape of what was built.

Second, and this is the part most students skip: a punch. Something larger than the thesis. Something that takes the argument one step further than the essay went, and leaves the reader thinking in the direction the student was arguing for.

That second part is the whole point of having a conclusion at all.

The easiest way to show this is with an example. Say a student is writing about why slavery in the US was not a mere economic model. Good body paragraphs. Clear argument. And then the conclusion reads:

“In conclusion, I have shown that slavery was wrong for the reasons above.”

Yes. We know. No one reading that essay needed to be told. The conclusion added nothing.

Now try this instead:

“In conclusion, the slavery in the US was not an economic system. An economic system does not need violence to stop its workforce from leaving and kidnapping as a recruitment method. Slavery needed chains, laws, and brutal punishment for escape and guns and ropes for new “hires” precisely because it was not economics. It was capture dressed as commerce. The violence wasn’t incidental, it was the proof.”

That’s a conclusion. It restates and extends. The reader finishes knowing something they didn’t fully consider before.

The rules are simple. I give students the don’ts first:

• Do not repeat the thesis in the same words.
• Do not ask a question.
• Do not introduce new information that wasn’t already in the essay.
• Do not write in first person unless the assignment asks for it.

Then the dos:

• Summarise, briefly, in your own words.
• Leave the reader with one final thought that is larger than your argument: a prediction, a recommendation, a revelation, or a moral.

Most of the time, the answer is already there somewhere in the body. The conclusion just needs to name it cleanly, finally, with more bite.