Imagine eating a hamburger with no bottom bun. How messy would that be? Your thumbs would be all slimy with ketchup and mustard, and different parts of the hamburger would probably start falling from your hands onto the plate. Even if it were the most scrumptious hamburger of your life, the lack of a bottom bun would ruin the whole thing.
Believe it or not, that’s the image you should picture when you’re writing an essay. Whether you’re composing a response for an English class assignment, your college applications, or the SAT, it doesn’t matter—you must write a clean, organized essay that’s held together with a conclusion (“the bottom hamburger bun”). What a difference one small thing can make!
A simple (and delicious) way to understand an appropriate, organized structure for an essay is to think of your composition as one big, juicy hamburger. Your introduction? That’s the top bun. Your body paragraphs? Those constitute the juicy stuff! They are the meat, lettuce, and tomato. And what’s holding it all together? The conclusion, which is your bottom bun.
So, why is a conclusion such an importance part of writing? Well, aside from the fact that it offers you one last chance to say something about your topic and to leave a good impression on your reader, its importance lies in the fact that it both summarizes your thoughts and demonstrates the importance of your ideas throughout your entire paper.
A successful conclusion draws your whole essay (your position on the topic, your main arguments to support it, and your specific examples) to a logical close; it is where you justify your argument to the reader and show why your argument is important.
According to Hamilton University’s “Writing Center” web page, the best strategies for writing a conclusion (apart from summarizing your main ideas) include the following:
- Proposing a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study.
- Raising qualifications to your argument (limiting or opposing viewpoints).
- Including a detail or example from the introduction to bring the argument full circle.
- Including a provocative insight or quotation from the reading.
If you use one of these strategies for the last sentence of your concluding paragraph, you’ll be sure to end your essay with a BANG!
Just as the last paragraph of your essay serves to tie everything you’ve said before it together, the last sentence of each of your body paragraphs should pull together or summarize that paragraph’s main ideas. If there were any doubt in my mind as to what you were trying to say in that paragraph, it should all make perfect sense by the time I’ve read its concluding sentence.
So, in a sense, the perfect essay would have several hamburgers (each body paragraph) within a bigger hamburger (the essay as a whole): it would be a hamburger hamburger! And each burger would have strong bottom buns!
Remember, even though you may think you’re saying the same thing over and over again and that concluding each paragraph along with your essay is too redundant, your teachers will see those “bottom hamburger buns” as proof of lovely, necessary organized thought. I guarantee it.
Now, let’s go write some burgers… and don’t forget the bottom bun!
