Boyung.com

Since I've been writing these things for a couple of months now, I've come back to the one thing that I always hated when I was writing regularly in high school and college: writing introductions and conclusions.  Obviously, these two items have their places in a piece, but I've always had difficulties with them.  Well, not really introductions so much, but definitely conclusions.  If you've read anything else I've done up to this point, you probably noticed that they seem to just trail off or stop abruptly.  At least, they seem that way to me.

When I was in school, I was taught that the introduction get the reader's attention and explain to them what the rest of the piece is going to be about.  That's not a big deal; it pretty much makes sense.  However, when we actually got graded on our writing, I found out that what most of these teachers really wanted was what amounts to a list of bullet points that are going to be made and expanded upon in the forthcoming sections of the piece.  Likewise, the conclusion, as I was taught, is supposed to summarize everything that was said up to that point and close out the piece, but what they really wanted was repeating that list of points with a sentence or two to group everything together.  This has never really made sense to me for a couple of related reasons, which is probably why I've always had such a problem with writing introductions and conclusions.

My first problem is that these introductions and conclusions do not really flow.  They seem very disjointed and separate from the main content, instead of part of it.  I have always felt that the introduction should leave the reader wanted to read more, and the conclusion should leave them with a sense of satisfaction regarding everything they just read.  With the way that I was taught, a reader could just read the introduction and the conclusion, and get the gist of the entire piece without having to read any more.  That seems like a complete waste to me.

My second problem, which really just stems from the first, is that I don't think that I have ever read anything written professionally that follows this format.  The introduction is just that, it introduces the overall tone of what is going to be discussed throughout the rest of the piece.  The conclusion rarely goes over the points detailed in the preceeding work, it just adds some additional commentary to close things out.  This is, in essence, what I was taught when learning how to write, but like I said earlier, that teaching was undermined to an extent of what the teacher was telling me when my papers were graded.  I think this has a lot to do with a certain amount of apathy that I have seen many teachers show towards individual students' needs.  But that is a topic for another day, and a future article.

Anyways, I guess that until I'm actually writing something professionally, where I have an editor that can yell at me until I figure out how to write a good conclusion, or the light bulb turns on in my head and I figure it out on my own, you're all going to just have to deal with conclusions that end like this.