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How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay: 11 Essay Conclusion Examples
Your conclusion is the last thing your reader sees. It shapes the final impression your essay makes, and that impression matters. A strong conclusion doesn't just repeat your thesis. It shows your reader why your argument matters, pulls your main points together into a coherent whole, and leaves them with something to think about after they finish reading. This guide explains how to write a conclusion for an essay in three steps, what to avoid, and provides eleven essay conclusion examples across different essay types and topics you can use as models.
How to Write an Essay Conclusion: Three Steps
Step 1: Return to Your Thesis
Open your conclusion by signaling that the essay is coming to an end, but don't simply copy and paste your thesis from the introduction. Instead, restate it in a way that reflects how your argument has developed over the course of the essay. You've presented evidence and analysis. Your conclusion should sound like someone who has proven something, not someone about to start proving it.
Weak: "In this essay I argued that the steel industry shaped western Pennsylvania's identity."
Stronger: "The steel industry didn't just employ western Pennsylvania. It defined the region's culture, its geography, and its sense of itself for more than a century."
Step 2: Summarize Your Main Points
Briefly remind your reader of the key points you made in the body of the essay. Don't list every paragraph in order, which is mechanical and reads like a table of contents. Instead, bring your points together in a way that shows how they connect and reinforce each other. The conclusion is your last chance to show that your essay adds up to something more than the sum of its parts.
Step 3: Show Why It Matters
End by zooming out to the bigger picture. Why does your argument matter beyond the specific topic of your essay? What does it suggest, imply, or open up? A strong closing sentence leaves the reader with a sense that something important has been established. Some ways to do this:
- Connect your argument to a broader theme or ongoing debate
- Suggest what your argument implies for the future
- Raise a question your essay has opened up without answering
- Show how your argument could apply in a different context
- Emphasize the real-world significance of your findings
What Not to Do in an Essay Conclusion
Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to include. Avoid these common conclusion mistakes:
- Don't start with "In conclusion" or "To sum up." These phrases aren't forbidden, but they weaken your opening. If you've returned to your thesis and begun pulling your argument together, it will be obvious you're concluding without having to announce it.
- Don't introduce new evidence. Any evidence that matters to your argument belongs in the body. Your conclusion can gesture toward broader implications, but it shouldn't introduce a new source or claim that needs to be explained and supported.
- Don't undermine your own argument. Avoid phrases like "Of course, there are good points on both sides" or "This is just one possible interpretation." Even if your essay acknowledged counterarguments, your conclusion should sound decisive. You've made your case. Stand behind it.
- Don't simply repeat your introduction word for word. Your conclusion and introduction serve different purposes. The introduction sets up the question. The conclusion answers it.
Essay Conclusion Examples
The following examples are organized by essay type. Each one is annotated to show what makes it effective. Read them as models rather than templates. Your conclusion should always be specific to your own argument.
Argumentative Essay Conclusion Examples
Example 1: Argumentative Essay on Steel Industry and Regional Identity (Western Pennsylvania)
"The steel industry's collapse did not erase western Pennsylvania's identity — it tested and ultimately revealed its depth. The communities along the Monongahela and Ohio rivers rebuilt not by forgetting what they had been, but by drawing on the same values of hard work and collective responsibility that had defined the region for a century. If economic resilience is a skill that can be developed, western Pennsylvania's story offers a clearer model for it than almost anywhere else in America."
Why it works: The conclusion restates the essay's core claim (the region's identity survived the industry's collapse), synthesizes the main argument (resilience grounded in existing values), and closes with a broader implication that gives the argument significance beyond the local context.
Example 2: Argumentative Essay on College Athlete Compensation (Ohio State University)
"Ohio State's football program generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. The athletes at the center of that revenue have, until recently, been prohibited from sharing in it. The Name, Image, and Likeness reforms that went into effect in 2021 represent a necessary correction — not a disruption to college athletics, but a belated acknowledgment that the labor producing its value deserves fair compensation. Institutions that adapt fully to this new landscape will be better positioned to recruit and retain the athletes who make their programs worth watching."
Why it works: The conclusion opens with a concrete fact, restates the essay's position clearly, and closes with a forward-looking implication that extends the argument beyond its immediate scope.
Example 3: Argumentative Essay on Standardized Testing (University of Texas)
"The University of Texas's test-optional admissions experiment during the pandemic offered a natural experiment in what selective universities actually value. Applicants admitted without SAT or ACT scores performed at comparable levels to those admitted with them. This evidence doesn't suggest that preparation and academic skill don't matter — it suggests that standardized tests measure them less reliably than their defenders claim. Admissions processes that prioritize demonstrated achievement over a single test score are more equitable, and more accurate, than the alternative."
Why it works: The conclusion introduces a specific piece of evidence from the essay's body (not new to the conclusion), synthesizes the argument, and closes with a clear, decisive claim that doesn't hedge.
Expository Essay Conclusion Examples
Example 4: Expository Essay on the Appalachian Coal Industry (Western Pennsylvania)
"Western Pennsylvania's coal industry shaped not just the region's economy but its physical landscape, its political culture, and the generational patterns of its communities. Understanding its rise and decline requires looking at forces operating simultaneously at the local, national, and global level — from the geology of the Allegheny Plateau to the regulatory environment in Washington and the price of natural gas on international markets. The story of coal in this region is, in miniature, the story of how industrial economies transform, resist change, and eventually find new paths forward."
Why it works: The conclusion brings together the different scales of analysis the essay covered, synthesizes them into a broader observation, and closes with a statement that gives the topic significance beyond the specific region.
Example 5: Expository Essay on Virginia Tech's Academic Mission (Blacksburg, Virginia)
"Virginia Tech's evolution from a small agricultural and mechanical college in Blacksburg to one of the nation's leading research universities reflects a broader shift in how American society values technical expertise. The institution's emphasis on solving real-world problems — from sustainable engineering to public health infrastructure — positions it not just as a regional resource but as a model for what land-grant universities can accomplish when they stay committed to the practical mission embedded in their founding."
Why it works: The conclusion connects the specific subject (Virginia Tech) to a broader observation about land-grant institutions, giving the essay's findings wider relevance and closing with a forward-looking frame.
Example 6: Expository Essay on the Rust Belt's Economic Transition
"The Rust Belt's economic transformation has been neither swift nor complete, but the cities and towns that have navigated it most successfully share a common approach: they leveraged existing assets — skilled workforces, research universities, and industrial infrastructure — rather than waiting for new industries to arrive from outside. Pittsburgh's emergence as a technology and healthcare hub didn't happen despite its industrial past. It happened in part because of it. That lesson has implications for every post-industrial community still working through the transition."
Why it works: The conclusion synthesizes the essay's argument, uses a specific example to anchor the claim, and closes by extending the implication outward to a broader audience.
Compare and Contrast Essay Conclusion Examples
Example 7: Compare and Contrast Essay on Ohio State and University of Texas Football Culture
"Ohio State and the University of Texas both treat football as something closer to a civic religion than a college sport, and both have built programs whose cultural weight extends well beyond campus. But where Ohio State's identity is shaped by its position as the undisputed anchor of a state with few competing major sports franchises, Texas operates in a landscape of fierce in-state rivalry and a professional sports market that competes for the same audiences. These different contexts explain not just how each program recruits and markets itself, but why each means something slightly different to the communities that follow it."
Why it works: The conclusion restates the comparison's core finding (both are culturally significant but for different structural reasons), explains the significance of the difference, and closes by connecting the comparison to a broader point about context and identity.
Example 8: Compare and Contrast Essay on Rural and Urban Education Funding
"The funding gap between rural school districts in western Pennsylvania and their suburban counterparts is not simply a matter of local tax bases — it is the product of policy choices made at the state level that have compounded over decades. Students in Johnstown or Connellsville are not receiving a lesser education because their communities value education less. They are receiving it because the systems designed to distribute educational resources have consistently failed to account for the particular disadvantages of economically distressed rural and post-industrial communities. Closing that gap requires acknowledging that it is a policy problem before it can be treated as one."
Why it works: The conclusion corrects a common misreading of the essay's evidence (framing the gap as a values problem rather than a policy problem), synthesizes the argument, and closes with a clear implication for action.
Literary Analysis Essay Conclusion Examples
Example 9: Literary Analysis of a Novel Set in Appalachia
"Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven does not romanticize the coal miners of southern West Virginia — it insists on their full humanity in the face of a system designed to reduce them to labor units. By tracing the personal histories of characters whose lives are shaped by the same corporate and political forces, the novel makes visible what economic histories often render abstract: the specific human cost of industrial capitalism in Appalachia. This is what distinguishes Giardina's work from mere historical fiction. It is a moral argument made through narrative, and it demands a moral response from its reader."
Why it works: The conclusion synthesizes the essay's literary analysis into a clear claim about the novel's purpose and significance, and closes with a statement about the relationship between literature and its reader that gives the analysis broader weight.
Example 10: Literary Analysis of a Personal Essay
"The personal essay works because it earns the universal through the specific. A writer describing growing up in Blacksburg, Virginia, watching the Tech campus define the rhythm of the town's life, is not writing about everyone's childhood — but in the particularity of that experience, a reader who grew up in a college town anywhere finds their own version of it. This is the form's central paradox: the more precisely a personal essay renders a specific experience, the more widely it tends to resonate. Precision, not generality, is what makes personal writing matter."
Why it works: The conclusion uses the specific example from the essay body to arrive at a general claim about the form being analyzed, giving the literary analysis implications beyond the single text under discussion.
Personal and College Admissions Essay Conclusion Examples
Example 11: College Admissions Essay (University of Texas at Austin)
"I don't know yet what I'll study at UT Austin, and I've stopped pretending that's a problem. What I know is that every time I've followed a question I couldn't answer, I've ended up somewhere I didn't expect and learned something I couldn't have planned. Austin's size, its culture of experimentation, and the sheer range of people I'll encounter there feel less like a context for my education than the education itself. I'm not applying because I know what I want to become. I'm applying because I think this is the place where I'll figure it out."
Why it works: The conclusion doesn't wrap up with false certainty. It restates the essay's core theme (following questions rather than answers) in a way that connects it directly to why this particular school is the right choice. The final sentence is decisive without being generic.
How Long Should an Essay Conclusion Be?
A conclusion should be roughly 10% of your total essay length. For a five-paragraph high school essay of around 500 to 800 words, this means one focused paragraph of about 75 to 100 words. For a longer college essay of 2,000 to 3,000 words, your conclusion may run 150 to 250 words. What matters more than the word count is that the conclusion does its job: restating the thesis, synthesizing the main points, and closing with a statement that gives the argument significance. A conclusion that does those three things efficiently is always better than one that is long for the sake of appearing thorough.
Frequently Asked Questions About Essay Conclusions
What goes in an essay conclusion?
A conclusion should contain three things: a rephrased version of your thesis that reflects how the argument has developed, a brief synthesis of your main supporting points that shows how they connect, and a closing statement that indicates why the argument matters. It should not introduce new evidence, start with "In conclusion," or undermine the position the essay has built.
Can I start my conclusion with "In conclusion"?
You can, but it's better not to. Opening with "In conclusion" announces what you're doing rather than doing it, and it tends to make conclusions feel formulaic. If you return directly to your thesis and begin synthesizing your argument, it will be clear you're concluding without needing to announce it. Save those two words for when nothing else fits.
How is a conclusion different from an introduction?
Your introduction sets up the question your essay will answer. Your conclusion answers it and shows why the answer matters. The introduction moves from broad context down to your specific thesis. The conclusion moves from the specific argument you've made back out to its broader significance. They mirror each other in structure but serve opposite purposes. Never copy your introduction into your conclusion.
Should I add new information in my conclusion?
No. Any evidence or analysis that supports your argument belongs in the body of the essay. Your conclusion can gesture toward broader implications (e.g., a question your essay raises, a context your argument applies to, a direction for future study) but it shouldn't introduce a new source or claim that hasn't been discussed and would require further explanation to understand.
What makes a conclusion memorable?
A memorable conclusion closes with a sentence that is specific, confident, and gives the reader something to carry with them. It doesn't trail off into vague observations or hedge its position. The examples above close with statements that are decisive and concrete. That decisiveness is what makes a conclusion feel like a landing rather than a stop.
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