On Endings

Ive been thinking more about this question Roxy raised on how to write a
(non-cheesy)
Ending, and what the purpose of an ending is, what its supposed to do.
As with anything, there isnt one way, and part of your crafting of an ending
will arise
from the particularities and problems addressed by you and the authors you
discuss. That
said, in looking through good student essays, there do seem to be some
patterns of
thinking you can employ at the end to get the most out of the 3-4 pages
youve taken the
time to write. After all of that work, you want the ending to be a kind of
emotional and
intellectual culmination to the ideas rendered, but you dont want to simply
restate
everything thats already been said or try and draw hard and fast answers
from complex
and difficult subjects.
A good ending begins with whats already been touched upon and broadens
out into other
related realms the essay has already hinted at but cannot fully develop. I
think of an
ending as a reaching outward from this concrete grounding youve laid into
other
related spaces.
At its center, an ending must address the stakes and significance of whats
been discussed. Ideally, youve been doing this throughout the essay, but
certainly the ending must contain creative and reflective sense-making on
why this thing youve taken the time to write about matters. You can do this
in many ways. The first, and maybe most objectionable on a cheese-factor, is
the kind of epiphany/self-realization found in The Art of Confronting
Stereotypes (Perhaps one day, we will recognize that above all, being
human is a reason for celebration, not segregation). Note that in shifting to
first-person plural (we), there is that broadening out. Think about how you
can write epiphanies while avoiding clich.
Another way to reflect thoughtfully is to offer up your own, tentative, halfway point between two opposing forces. If youve been exploring (A) vs. (B),
what does combining the best of both look like, or finding some kind of
middle ground? Take a look at this passage from Looking Past the Present
for an example of this:

But even though Birkertss warnings, like those of Sedariss father, are augmented by fear not facts, they
are essential. These premonitions keep us in check. Fear acts, as Langer would say, as a symbol that
urges us to consider the past and the future. Birkerts and Sedariss father ultimately do us a service by
sparking our awareness. It is human nature for us to be pessimistic as a result of a change, to have fear
instilled within us, to look up at the clock and feel anxious. But these feelings keep us rooted to our past
and headed to our future. They keep us from speeding and weaving through dangerous highways with each
new historical transition. Our awareness of the symbolic nature of language can steer us on a steady road to
the future so that, when we look up at the clock near Broadway, we will have nothing to fearour language
and our history will both keep ticking.

Well call this option adding an invisible option (C) to the (A)/(B) paradigm.
In thinking about this play on realizing an as-of-yet unarticulated solution
or compromise to two opposing forces, you may have to acknowledge we
dont live in an ideal world, and were taken into a realm of hypothethicals
(see the repeated use of perhaps in Marlboro Man & Migrant Mother). Its
okay, in an ending, to use perhaps/maybe/ifs as a way of expressing a kind of
restrained optimism. Youre not going to call for World Peace here; were not
Pollyannas, but you can act as a sort of diplomat between two sides by
putting forward a hypothetical proposal to the dialectics and contradictions
you discuss. Perhaps only in hypotheticals can we envision alternatives to
the problems put forththey allow us to tentatively reformulate what the
world should look like.
The idea is to create something new out of whats been already established
in the essay. An ending can also redefine a key term you established in the
beginning in light of all the evidence youve put forth since. (i.e. if your essay
is discussing the role of family in Victorian London, maybe the end redefines
family as something more comprehensive than what you initially started
with.) Another way of borrowing is to take one of the key words or images
and use it as a metaphor to express something of yours (i.e. if the essay
youre discussing is about architecture, why not discuss intellectual
foundations, at the end, instead of merely literal ones. Or figurative stages in
a paper about theater. Etc.)
Finally, you may want to use an ending to discuss how all of this applies to
your own lifeand you can write about personal experience without ever
using Ihow have the ideas and images youre exploring revealed
themselves to you off the page and reshaped and sharpened the way in
which you view the day-to-day experiences that make up your life?
An ending, in addition to but even more than making you think, should make
you feel.
--adapted from Professor Jackie Reitzes