Writing A Powerful College Research Paper Conclusion

The conclusion of your research paper can be an extremely important part of your college research paper. If you think about it, it is the last thing that your audience reads and it will probably be what the reader remembers. Because of this, you need to make sure they remember something substantial about your paper. Think about what you want your audience to remember when they think about your thesis and it may help you decide what to include in your conclusion. There are some necessary components to your conclusion as well as some options that can make or break your paper. Here are some ways to write a powerful college research paper conclusion:

• Restate your topic sentence and tell your audience why it even matters. Just touch on this in your conclusion because your paper should stand for itself and have explained your thesis statement quite well.


• Your conclusion should also summarize the main points of your paper. Just briefly restate your topic sentences but try not to get into the evidence of those sentences. Try not to introduce any new information in this paragraph.


• If it is relevant to your paper, make a call to action. In other words, tell your audience that it is their turn to do something about what you are writing about. Hopefully your paper will stimulate further discussion or it may be the basis of continued arguments or learning. Hopefully it will make your audience want to do something to learn more.


• Use your conclusion to bring your paper full circle. You may try to ask a question in your introduction and then restate the question in your conclusion as well as giving the answer. You could also start a story in the introduction but not tell the end of the story until the conclusion.


• Ask a question in your conclusion that will elicit some kind of emotion or reaction in your reader. You want your conclusion to start an argument or discussion among your peers. The greatest compliment about your own research paper is to have people talk about it or use it as a reference in a discussion they are having with their peers.


• Another thing you can do in your conclusion is suggest a course of action or give your reader other places to go for more information on the subject. Try and give your reader something useful that he can take away from the paper. Give him a reason to want to tell someone else about it.