how to conclude a history essay

how to conclude a history essay

Effective Strategies for Concluding History Essays

1. Introduction to Essay Conclusions

The conclusion is a place to summarize your ideas in a cautiously shaped judgment. Recommended are general suggestions for the type and length of conclusion, followed by step-by-step suggestions for the judgment of your paper’s main ideas. In your conclusion, you have three options. First, in a simple sense, you can restate your main ideas, concepts, problems, and insights about them. Second, you can consider their implications. Third, you may offer a call for further research. The use to which a reader is likely to put your paper will help guide your choice. A combination of these strategies is also appropriate.

In this class, you’ve learned about the strategies employed by previous history students in writing history essays, from brainstorming ideas to managing your work before, during, and after the writing process. But what about ending your essay? In the conclusion, you present a judgment. The following are suggestions about how to flesh out the judgment that is your conclusion. But be aware that a good conclusion can help the reader answer critical queries about your paper’s purpose and its quality. Accordingly, do spend time on it and make it substantive.

2. Summarizing Key Points

In conclusion, I have attempted to reveal to you that history presents an opportunity to investigate the past, to learn about change and continuity, and to become familiar with a community’s cultural experiences in order to piece together a cultural mosaic. My examination of the importance of teaching writing as well as history has resulted in my creating some positive strategies for helping students write meaningful conclusions. Specifically, these strategies revolve around the precept that the goal of the conclusion is to leave a lasting impression upon the reader and effectively link the essay to the title. Therefore, it is essential that history instructors do not violate the time-honored tradition of teaching history through the use of scaffolding but instead remain faithful to that tradition. Consequently, these strategies may prove to be very beneficial to both students who already possess strong writing skills and to those who need help in this area.

3. Reflecting on Significance and Implications

In order to dwell on these aspects, it might be useful to brainstorm with the students about the most thought-provoking aspects of the historical issue which has been the focus of the essay. This should also bring into relief some noteworthy aspects or implications of the historical issue, which might not be readily apparent from the rest of the essay and make sure that each essay provides the reader with sufficient contextualization for those explicitly stated moments of reflection. The students should take a few minutes to comment on the essay and to identify those instances that manifest their reflection of significance and implications. With time and practice, students will develop a knack for knitting their conclusion into the rest of the essay, and their writing will become richer and more holistic.

By the conclusion, students might feel exhausted from the intellectual effort of researching and writing. In expository essays, students draw conclusions from their arguments; in persuasive essays, students contend not only with the evidence itself but they also persuade others of the conclusions to be drawn about that evidence. As students reach the conclusion, they should remain aware of their larger objectives and also realize the impact that their hard work will have on their readers. Thus, the conclusion should not only summarize the essay, it must also reflect on the significance of the historical issue at hand and, finally, make some observations regarding how the issue has been treated over time and how it might be confronted in the future.

4. Proposing Future Research Directions

Given our deep body of qualitative research about historians at work, what else could we or others explore as we try to better identify the conventions and expectations of historical writing? To answer, one might consider the research that has been done in conjunction with other kinds of complex rhetorical work. For example, readers have put expertise into focus, conducting studies on nursing, legal, and engineering writing. Those chapters offer intriguing insights into both discipline-specific expertise and discipline-specific conventions and expectations (the two categories I talked about in Chapter 2). The cumulative pool of scholarship in these chapters can offer invaluable guidance for writing instructors and writing tutors who encounter not expert historians.

There are several ways that the existing strategies for concluding history essays could be modified and made more effective, as well as alternative techniques that could be used. Creating more strategies for effectively ending history essays would give instructors the flexibility to mix it up in the history classroom. I offer three ways researchers might further enrich knowledge about another specific part of the history – writing process: content analysis, which would highlight how non-expert historians (novices) weave evidence into their historical arguments; error analysis, which would give instructors and tutors insight into the major writing pitfalls encountered by non-expert historians; and longitudinal and control group studies, which would illuminate unchanged strategies over time. Specifically, future researchers might take their cues from existing qualitative studies about the writing of historians.

5. Crafting a Memorable Closing Statement

The gracious exit may involve returning to your opening metaphor or anecdote. If you opened with a quote, return to it. A neat summary of your essay gives your reader something to hold onto and rest easy with. Instead of your essay petering out into nothingness or merely repeating the same points again, restate the importance of your topic and the consequences of your argument. Ultimately, why does your essay matter? History is not just a long list of dates and names and places. Throughout history, and even today, there are judgments being made and misrepresented. Some things are perceived as ‘good’ and some as ‘bad’, which makes life rich and interesting. Even things as straightforward as historical events begin to seem flat unless they include some summary or judgment as to their significance. With this decision, my hope for you is that your history essays read less like a blow-by-blow commentary but more like a rich and textured account of the past.

Without a catchy final statement, your essay could end up feeling like an unfinished task. So take the time to craft something that will clearly and effectively draw history to a close. This is where a great writer is your friend – and I mean this sincerely. A Shakespearean truth can make for a powerful and thought-provoking final statement, but it must be both. Humor in ending an essay is always effective, just as it’s effective in grabbing a reader’s attention in the opening paragraph. Uncredited proverbs, MPC truisms, and fictional Jedi maxims definitely hold their place, but ensure that any word of wisdom you pick won’t be considered a cliché by your reader. At least until they’ve read your interpretation of it.