Endings

-- Valerie Ross I originally titled this section Conclusions but then realized how misleading that might be. A section on conclusions would rightly be titled Propositions. In fact, for those of you still curious about why we have until now prohibited you from writing conclusions, you should know that you have been concluding all along, at least if you have been doing the exercises correctly. Your proposition, the statement that you set out to justify or explain to your readers, is your conclusion. The ending, on the other hand, is your farewell. The ending is your penultimate chunk, written before the introduction. There are many ways to say goodbye. Most are not very good. For example: the hook linking the final paragraph to the introductory paragraph. This disconnected, tacked-on device is like a bad pick-up line, easy, cheesy, and ineffective. The hook makes a hamburger of your essay when what you want to dish up is a unified, coherent essay in which every part works together to seal your readers adherence. the summary: a bore and an insult to your reader unless you have written a very long or extremely complex text the apology: awful. If a texts own author doesnt respect what he has written, why should the reader? If you havent done a decent job of addressing the subject, revise. If false modesty triggers the apology, beware: Your reader may accept it.

But, you may protest, we were taught these very devices in high school. Yes, you learned from practicing hooks and summaries that essays demand closure. The goal of most high school and some college writing is demonstration of knowledge, rather than the real-world tasks of rhetoric, informing or persuading real audiences. Demonstration lacks authentic rhetorical purpose and conjures up peculiar analogies, such as, Introductions and conclusions are like hamburger bunsbetween which you sandwich your essay-patty. You must now set aside your burgers and learn to be real writers, which soon you shall be, like it or not. Future scientists, engineers, businesspeople, doctors, nurses, artists: You think you wont be writing but youre wrong. Ask your professors and practitioners. Your livelihood and advancement are going to pivot on writing: grants, proposals, reports, cases, memos, press releases, promotional campaigns, plans, letters, emails, websites. In every instance, you will have a real purpose and a real audience upon whom you shall have real designs. You will need to find endings that accomplish your goals. What do you want your reader to think, feel, and do upon completing your text? How are you going to make this happen? Some of the best critical texts havent much of an ending. They dont need one. A well-constructed piece of reasoning never lets its reader lose sight of its proposition. Reader and writer know where theyre going. Unlike the novices conclusion, which may make a heroic attempt to cohere the meandering mess that preceded it, strategically-deployed logic and psychology organize the sophisticated essay. Its arguments and evidence converge as if inevitable. The masterful writer may thus end on his strongest reason without need for hooks, chains, exhortations, whimpers or bangs.

There are two basic strategies for exiting an essay: 1) a guided recollection of highlights that provides a somewhat different perspective on them or on the proposition 2) an exploration of the broader implications of what the reader has just read Think of the ending as a parting gift. Just as you wouldnt end your visit by giving your guest a summary of all that you said and did during his visit, so too you dont ruin your readers experience by droning on about all that he just read. Equally obnoxious is the host who ends by doubling back to the first day and repeating a story he told you then, now adding a little twist to it that sums up your time together. And while were on the subject of obnoxious endings, remember that nobody likes long goodbyes. A good ending, like a thoughtful parting gift, is handled with alacrity. It strikes just the right feeling, reminds the reader of your time together, and gives your proposition a future. There are a variety of ways to end on the right note. For example: offer a universal premise that has now been prepared-for by the essays reasoning connect what you have argued or explained to a different context (local, national, personal, professional, historical, etc.) consider what you have said from a different perspective (for example, quoting another writer on the topic or imagining what someone else might conclude from your piece) speculate about the consequences of your argument explain how your argument might be applied to some specific or general situation tell the reader what to do now that you have gained his adherence complicate what you have said, perhaps pointing to gaps or flaws in your reasoning or evidence that remain to be addressed

These techniques, however, shouldnt simply become a replacement for the hook or the conclusion. Choose an ending, or invent another, that gets your particular job done. Like all artists and craftspeople, critical writers use forms and techniques purposefully. Consider the sentence, our most basic form. What if every time you wrote a sentence you used the same construction? That would make for tedious, predictable, restricted writing. All of the rhetorical forms have a particular purpose and set up particular expectations in your audience. Their basic construction and purpose, like that of the sentence, needs to be understood and honored. But, as with the sentence and its parts, there is much you can do with these various forms of reasoning. Once you understand how they work, you can warp and shape and fill and arrange them to suit your purposes, audiences, vision, and style. You have gained control over your writing. Along with introducing broader implications, an ending can do something that is otherwise frowned upon in critical writing. Endings are a good place to smuggle in a bit of emotion. Consider not only what you want the reader to think, and to do, but also what you want him to feel as he departs your essay. If you want to leave him crying or laughing, end with the sorrowful or comical implications of your piece. Rile him up if you want to get him out to vote. Calm him down so that he can take considered action, or keep him on an even emotional keel if you need him to remain neutral and

objective for a clear-headed decision. Maybe you wish to give him hope, or fill him with love, or urge him to investigate further or even to challenge your findings. Whatever you do, be sure that you dont alter the register of your voice so radically that you end up creating stylistic incoherence. George Orwell, a great critical writer, is often studied for his rhetorical genius. Orwell typically opens with a very specific focus. For example, he opens one piece by targeting a pamphlet opposed to any bombing that incidentally kills civilians. Orwell begins: Miss Vera Brittain's pamphlet, Seed of Chaos, is an eloquent attack on indiscriminate or obliteration bombing. Orwell goes on to provide a series of reasons why this position is absurd. His final paragraph contains his strongest reason (Nestorian in action!): As to international agreements to limit war, they are never kept when it pays to break them. Long before the last war the nations had agreed not to use gas, but they used it all the same. This time they have refrained, merely because gas is comparatively ineffective in a war of movement, while its use against civilian populations would be sure to provoke reprisals in kind. Against an enemy who can't hit back, e.g. the Abyssinians, it is used readily enough. War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable. Notice that Orwell does not have a conventional concluding paragraph. Instead, he simply bends his final two sentences toward closure, in the same way that some of you have been sneakily doing with your three-paragraph exercises. This strategy of closure is brilliant, but not recommended for your individual chunks because premature endings make those chunks difficult to link to other chunks when you get ready to cohere your final paper. But melding a few closing sentences into the strongest final reason can be an elegant, satisfying way to bring a well-reasoned piece to a close. A significant number of Orwells essays end in this fashion. He will use the last paragraph as his strongest reason and then, in countermotion, add a couple of closing lines that infuse the entire piece with some larger, overarching premise or perspective. In this particular essay, he closes with two major premises that he wishes to drive home: War is barbarous and we are savages. Had Orwell opened with these big ideas, he probably would have confused and perhaps misled his readers, who would expect a treatise on war and savagery, rather than a finely-tuned refutation of a pamphlet. Equally important would have been the monumental writing task he would have set out for himself, to build a bridge from savagery and barbarism to Miss Brittains pamphlet, akin to building a bridge joining a mountain to a molehill in the space of a paragraph. Instead, Orwell primes his reader for his larger premises. As we read his piece, we are not aware that our journey is going to lead to such a grand view, but we are perfectly prepared for it. We may not immediately embrace it, but it will resonate through and beyond the proposition and the experience of the essay itself. If the purpose of the introduction is to warm your reader up and orient him so that he is ready for your proposition, the purpose of the ending is to show the reader how far he has come, where you have taken him. Arriving under agreeable circumstances, the reader will be more receptive to a broader premise, especially because he knows you will be brief: He can see the white space at the bottom of the page.

Along with the skillful construction of his argument, notice the discipline Orwell demonstrates in his handling of tone. His closing sentences are flat, nearly matter of fact. A lesser writer would have bellowed at the top of that mountain. The very words savage and barbarous call for a belch of outrage. But Orwell takes the road less traveled. He converges purpose, tone, and content, and brings to a fine point the significance of his argument. If we are ever to end war, reason rather than emotion must lead us. Before ending this section on endings, let me point out that you are now able to do what Ive done here. Theres nothing magical about it. If you want more ideas on how to open or close papers, how to integrate quotations, how to set up a sharp refutation or a moving concession, analyze the writers you are reading in your courses and professions. Study what other writers do. That is what you have been learning and practicing: how to read like a writer. Stealing a writers says is plagiarism, but lifting their rhetorical strategies is fair game. Published work will always be there for you now, serving as your free, lifetime university. Pay attention to how writers get in and out of their texts, how they order their reasons, what kinds of evidence they wheel in and when and why, what premises, tone of voice and register of language they use. Borrow and adapt their strategies. Make outlines of their work and use them as blueprints for your own. If, like some of our greatest writers, you are an adventurous sort, branch out and study the writings of other disciplines and professions. You may even pick up some ideas from poets, fictionists, and filmmakers. They all use introductions, endings, reasons, evidence, refutation and concession; they all have a grammar of reason, arranging its parts, like parts of a sentence, to suit their purposes. You are now equipped to pierce through what other writers are saying to see how they went about saying it, just as painters, musicians, builders, web developers, and other writers do with the work of their colleagues and their role models. As an undergraduate, you frankly havent much choice. For the next few years, you have the unbelievably tough job of writing for many tribes, each moved by the grammar and rhetoric of reasoning that you have been practicing, but each and every one insistent that your presentation of it follows their customs. The only way to do that well, and quickly, is by reading like a writer.

TRIBUNE
May 19, 1944 George Orwell
Miss Vera Brittain's pamphlet, Seed of Chaos, is an eloquent attack on indiscriminate or obliteration bombing. Owing to the R.A.F. raids, she says, thousands of helpless and innocent people in German, Italian and German-occupied cities are being subjected to agonizing forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages. Various wellknown opponents of bombing, such as General Franco and Major-General Fuller, are brought out in support of this. Miss Brittain is not, however, taking the pacifist standpoint. She is willing and anxious to win the war, apparently. She merely wishes us to stick to legitimate methods of war and abandon civilian bombing, which she fears will blacken our reputation in the eyes of posterity. Her pamphlet is issued by the Bombing Restriction Committee, which has issued others with similar titles. Now, no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. On the other hand, no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of limiting or humanizing war N is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords.

The catchwords used in this connexion are killing civilians, massacre of women and children and destruction of our cultural heritage. It is tacitly assumed that air bombing does more of this kind of thing than ground warfare. When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers are usually the first to be evacuated, and some of the young men will be away in the army. Probably a disproportionately large number of bomb victims will be middle-aged. (Up to date, German bombs have killed between six and seven thousand children in this country. This is, I believe, less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period.) On the other hand, normal or legitimate warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words civilian bombing will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front. War is not avoidable at this stage of history, and since it has to happen it does not seem to me a bad thing that others should be killed besides young men. I wrote in 1937: Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet hole in him. We haven't yet seen that (it is perhaps a contradiction in terms), but at any rate the Suffering of this war has been shared out more evenly than the last one was. The immunity of the civilian, one of the things that have made war possible, has been shattered. Unlike Miss Brittain, I don't regret that. I can't feel that war is humanized by being confined to the slaughter of the young and becomes barbarous when the old get killed as well. As to international agreements to limit war, they are never kept when it pays to break them. Long before the last war the nations had agreed not to use gas, but they used it all the same. This time they have refrained, merely because gas is comparatively ineffective in a war of movement, while its use against civilian populations would be sure to provoke reprisals in kind. Against an enemy who can't hit back, e.g. the Abyssinians, it is used readily enough. War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.