Tutorama: Week Twelve: Introductions and Conclusions

Introduction
While the body paragraphs are the heart of every paper, the introduction and conclusion are important to the overall success. Your introduction must set up your project and invite the reader to be interested in it; your conclusion can announce where you have arrived or indicate where a reader might go next. Introductions and conclusions help you to focus your topic and prepare the reader to begin her own response to your project, once your paper ends. Below are some techniques for crafting introductions and conclusions.

Introductory Paragraphs
The purpose of an introductory paragraph is to:

1. Provide context, and set up your project
   What this means: Context is the specific historical, intellectual or public conversation to which your essay contributes. Your introduction should present briefly the issues that are central to your paper, in part, because they are central to the readings for the assignment. Part of providing context involves identifying the texts and authors you will address in your paper.

2. Introduce the terms and concepts that your reader needs to know to understand your argument.
   What this means: You should mention the key terms of your project so that your reader knows to pay attention to how you define and use these terms later on in your paper.

3. Briefly explain your project in 2-3 sentences.
   What this means: As described in Project Writing I, you should develop a brief statement that describes the relationship between ideas that you are exploring with your essay, the essays you’ve read, and the assignment question.

Strategy: Building your introduction…backwards

Step 1: Use the techniques from Project Writing I to write 2-3 sentences as a statement of project. These will serve as your final sentences in your introductory paragraph.

Step 2: Underline the key words in your project statement. Write sentences that introduce and briefly define these terms. These sentences should appear before your project statement in your introductory paragraph.

Step 3: In 1-2 sentences, briefly summarize the positions of each author on the issues in your project statement, particularly in reference to the key words you identified in Step 2. These sentences provide the context of the critical conversation that you are engaging in with your project. These sentences should go at the beginning of your paragraph.

Step 4: Put all of the sentences together in a paragraph. Revise the paragraph so that the ideas build logically from one to another.

Conclusions
The purpose of a conclusion is to announce where you’ve arrived. It may explain the overall significance of your project by placing it back in the context you provided in your introduction. Or, it may acknowledge the limitations of your position, and open up how you might continue were your paper another 5-6 pages. Or, it might suggest solutions to the issues or problems your paper has explored. Use your responses to the questions below to help you build a concluding paragraph.

Questions to help you conclude your essay:

1. What was your position in relation to the authors in your paper?

2. How has your position added to the interest in the main issues?How has your position challenged or changed the set of ideas offered by the essays?

3. How do you see the issue differently as a result of claiming a position?

4. What do you want your readers to have learned from reading your essay?

Conclusion
Your introductory and concluding paragraphs connect your own position to the critical conversation and help to provide clarity and focus for your project. They help guide your reader into and out of the ideas that you’re presenting. They explain not only what your project is, but why it is important both within and beyond the composition classroom.

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