How to Close an Informative Essay

How to Close an Informative Essay

Whether you love or hate them, essays are a necessary evil within the educational community, so you can bet that you’ll have to write a variety of them throughout your academic career. Rather than bemoan this reality, you can learn strategies to improve your writing skills and tackle those essays head on with confidence. Informative essays, like most other essays, have three main components: an introduction, body paragraphs and a conclusion. The conclusion may be the last thing you write, but it deserves just as much effort and attention as the rest of your essay.

1 Purpose of an Informative Essay

As you might have guessed, the purpose of an informative essay is to provide information on a given topic. A well-written informative essay will educate the reader on its topic through thorough explanation and use of evidence and examples to support the information. Opinion has no place in an informative essay. All the information presented must be sufficiently backed up with evidence from legitimate sources. The writing style for an informative essay should be objective and avoid the use of first person pronouns.

2 Purpose of a Conclusion for an Informative Essay

Writing the conclusion for your informative essay is just as important as the introduction. The conclusion is the last thing your reader will read about your topic, which is why it needs to pack a powerful punch to make it relevant and memorable. The goal of your conclusion should be to eloquently summarize the content of your essay, but you should aim to do so in a way that the reader is likely to remember.

3 Prepare to Write Your Conclusion

A little bit of brainstorming often goes a long way. Before you jump right into writing your conclusion, take a moment to question the content of your essay. Why is the information you presented important? Your conclusion should include a clear answer to that question. Once you’ve identified what is meaningful about your essay’s content, make a list that highlights all its key ideas so that you don’t leave any out of your conclusion. Finally, reread your introduction and look for any themes you may have mentioned there that you could reiterate in the conclusion.

4 Write Your Conclusion

The conclusion should be short and sweet, so keep it to no more than five to seven sentences in length. Take the topic sentences from each of your body paragraphs and restate them in a new way to create a summary of your essay’s content. Next, take the thesis statement from your introduction and try to say the same thing in a new and interesting way. Finally, wrap up your conclusion with an authoritative sentence that effectively summarizes the main point of the whole thing.

Kristina Barroso earned a B.A. in Psychology from Florida International University and works full-time as a classroom teacher in a public school. She teaches middle school English to a wide range of students from struggling readers to advanced and gifted populations. In her spare time, she loves writing articles about education for TheClassroom.com, WorkingMother and other education sites.

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