SAT Essay Help: The Conclusion

Leaving your reader with a strong impression just seconds before he or she assigns a score to your essay is a great strategy. But with just a couple of minutes left, how can you do more than simply summarize your writing?

First, keep your expectations reasonable. Aim for two or three sentences, and make the first a rewording of your thesis statement. It might sound redundant, but it serves an important purpose: By including a reiterated thesis, you remind the reader that you had a strong idea and followed it through to the end of your essay. What can you follow it with? Here are three ideas for quick yet memorable endings:

1. Offer a solution or suggestion:

Keeping our daily lives in perspective can be as simple as planning for the future. If we take steps now to improve our situation later, such as by imposing banking regulations that will help us avoid future recessions, our day-to-day problems will be easier to handle.

Did you notice the following?

• The reworked thesis repeats the heartbeat words.
• The second sentence begins with If.
• The solution or suggestion is specific (uses such as followed by an example).
2. Include a quote. You came up with some quotes in Chapter 2. Now is your chance to use one if it works in the context of your essay:

By learning from our past and creating plans for the future based on what we learn, we can keep today's problems in perspective. The refrain from the Great Depression, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" echoes true again today. But just as the economy recovered after the Depression, we can be confident that today's situation will also improve.

 

Success often depends on effort. Thomas Edison once said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Edison would have agreed that nothing takes the place of hard work. As good as his ideas were, it was the time he spent trying, failing, and retrying that was the key to his success.

3. Create an analogy. Describe a situation that illustrates your thesis, introducing it with Just as and concluding it with so too can:

By learning from our past and creating plans for the future based on what we learn, we can keep today's problems in perspective. Just as an athlete keeps her "eye on the prize" to get through grueling workouts, so too can we focus on the big picture to take steps toward our future.

Exercise

Complete three conclusions using this as your first sentence: Keeping our daily lives in perspective can be as simple as planning for the future.

1. Offer a solution or suggestion.  



2. Use a quote from the content you developed in Chapter 2 or another of your choosing.



3. Create an analogy