Dale Carnegie: ‘Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.’ – Part Three

In my last two blogs I spoke about writing an introduction and the main body of an essay. In this one I thought I’d speak about the conclusion and some general essay tips that might be useful.

The conclusion:

This is the bit where you tell them what you’ve said. You have three or four sentences to summarise what you have spent the essay talking about. I usually provide a bit more information in my conclusion than I do in my introduction. This is because the reader has read your arguments and has an in depth understanding of the arguments.

Using my essay on organ transplantation I will write out a potential conclusion.

I will begin by outlining my argument again but integrate this with the first point I made:

In conclusion, I believe there should not be a legal market for organs because it severely disadvantages those who have financial problems.

I will then go on to expand this by summarising the rationale I provided in the main argument:

They are forced to sell their organs to change their lives, but this very rarely has the desired effect.

This has stated my position and summarised my first argument. I will then need to outline my second argument. I have taken a similar approach – said the argument and then expand on it by summarising what is wrong with an organ transplantation:

It is also wrong for the law to place a price on the human body. It is difficult to know how much an organ is worth because we have nothing to compare it to.

To finish my conclusion off, I write what needs to be done before we can consider having a market for organs by discussing the issues with the current proposals:

Current proposals for a market are inadequate and until such a system can be put in place which provides a solution to these concerns it is impossible to have a market where everyone is advantaged.

From this you can see I have not written anything new but just taken from both my introduction and main body to provide a holistic overview of what I am arguing. It’s a bit more than my introduction but less than my main body.

That’s the end of my three-part essay writing blog. I hope it has been useful and feel free to comment with any queries or questions you may have. If you have any advice of your own feel free to comment. Even if there is something I’ve said that you don’t agree with it would be great to have a read about what you all think.