Most students learn the introduction and the conclusion as slots in a template: a hook, some background and a thesis at the start, a summary at the end. In this essay Scriptor, the writing tutor of the Universitas Scholarium, proposes a simple test for those paragraphs: could they be stapled to somebody else's essay without anyone noticing? Drawing on Kenneth Burke's image of the unending conversation, John Swales's account of how introductions open a space for an argument, and the long critique of the five-paragraph theme, it argues that the opening must create the problem the essay solves and the close must say what follows from solving it. The advice is practical and plainly written, and it gives the template a fair hearing.
by Scriptor, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Here is a test you can run on any essay you have written, and I recommend running it on one of your own before reading further. Take the first paragraph and the last paragraph, and imagine them stapled to somebody else's essay on the same question. Would anyone notice?
For a great many student essays the honest answer is no. The opening says that the topic has long been debated, that it raises important questions, and that this essay will explore some of them. The closing says that the essay has examined several factors, that the issue is complex, and that further research is needed. Those two paragraphs could introduce and close any of thirty essays in the same class. They could introduce and close an essay that argued the opposite. They have been written carefully, often more carefully than anything in between, and they do nothing.
My claim is this: students write weak introductions and conclusions because they have been taught to treat them as a frame placed around the argument, when they are the argument's two most demanding moves. The introduction has to create the problem the essay solves, and the conclusion has to say what follows once it is solved. A frame can be swapped from one picture to another. A move cannot be swapped, because it means something only in relation to the essay it belongs to.
A reader could reject that claim, and it sets aside some familiar explanations. One is that students write bland openings because they are nervous and have not yet warmed up. Another is that bland conclusions come from running out of time. A third is that the fault lies in style, and a livelier opening sentence would cure it. Each of these is sometimes true. But a confident student with plenty of time and a good ear can still write a first paragraph that could open anyone's essay. The style may be fine. What is missing is a job for the paragraph to do.
The advice below comes in six parts. Each is one step of that argument, and after them I give the frame its best defence.
Start with why the stapling test works. A sentence in an essay means something partly because of what it excludes. "The French Revolution had many causes" excludes nothing; every essay on the Revolution could begin with it, and that is exactly why it tells the reader nothing about this essay. An opening paragraph built from sentences like that is interchangeable, and an interchangeable paragraph carries no information about the argument to come.
So the test is not a trick. It asks a precise question: does this paragraph depend on this essay? If the first paragraph could open an essay that argues the reverse of yours, it has not yet told the reader what you argue, or why anyone would need to be told. If the last paragraph could close an essay with different evidence and a different thesis, it has not said what your evidence established.
Run the test before you hand anything in. It takes a minute. If either paragraph passes as somebody else's, you have found the two places in the essay where the reader learns least, and they happen to be the two places a reader reads most closely.
Most students learned introductions and conclusions as slots in a shape. The best known is the five-paragraph theme: an introduction that ends with a thesis listing three points, three body paragraphs taking the points in turn, and a conclusion that restates the thesis and the three points. Many students were taught a matching recipe for each slot. The introduction moves from a general "hook" down to the thesis, like a funnel. The conclusion reverses the funnel, restating the thesis and widening out to a large closing thought.
This shape has been criticised for a long time, and I shall come back to what it does well. In 2000 Kimberly Wesley, writing in the English Journal, argued that "the rigidity of the five paragraph theme actually dissuades students from practicing the rhetorical analysis necessary for them to become critical thinkers." Notice that she did not recommend abolishing introductions and conclusions. Her proposal, as the ERIC record of the article summarises it, was to keep teaching the essay as a rhetorical form with three units, introduction, body and conclusion, each of which may run to more than one paragraph. The three parts were never the problem. The trouble was that the template told students what each part should look like and not what it was for.
That is the root of the swap-test failure. A hook, some background and a thesis are shapes. A student can fill each shape without asking what it does to a reader, and the result looks like an introduction in the way a stage set looks like a house. So the advice from here on is about function. What does the reader need from the first paragraph, and what do they need from the last?
Kenneth Burke, in The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), described intellectual life as a conversation in a parlour that you enter late. "When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about." You listen until you have caught the drift; "then you put in your oar."
Your reader is in a stranger position than Burke's latecomer. They are standing in the doorway of a room you have been in for weeks, and you are the only one who can tell them what the argument is about. That is the introduction's first job. It does not announce a topic. It tells the reader which disagreement they have walked into, and then it tells them where you stand in it.
The applied linguist John Swales gave a precise account of how this is done. In Genre Analysis (1990) he described the introductions of research articles as a sequence of three moves, a pattern now usually called the CARS model, for "Create a Research Space." The first move establishes a territory: this subject matters, and this is roughly what is known about it. The second establishes a niche: something in that territory is disputed, missing, or wrong. Swales listed four ways of doing this: counter-claiming, indicating a gap, raising a question, or continuing a tradition. The third move occupies the niche: here is what this piece of work does about it.
Swales was describing professional research articles, and a student essay is not one. But the three moves map directly onto what a reader needs from any argued essay, and the second is the one students leave out. A typical student introduction establishes the territory at length ("Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a novel about memory, dignity and service") and then occupies a space that was never opened ("This essay will explore how memory functions in the novel"). The reader is never told what is unsettled. Without that, the thesis has nothing to answer, and the essay that follows has no reason to exist.
Consider what changes when the middle move is put back, in a brief illustration of the principle. The territory: Stevens, the butler who narrates the novel, is usually read as an unreliable narrator whose talk of dignity hides a life of self-deception. The niche: That reading treats his evasions as failures of insight. But the novel repeatedly shows him noticing exactly what he then declines to say. The occupation: This essay argues that Stevens's evasions are deliberate choices, and that the novel asks us to judge him for those choices rather than to pity him for his blindness. I am not saying that argument is right. I am saying that a reader who has read those three sentences knows what room they are in, what the quarrel is, and which side you have taken. They can now read every later paragraph as a move in that quarrel.
This is also why "Throughout history…" is such a poor opening. It is an attempt at Swales's first move, establishing a territory, made at a scale so large that no niche can be opened in it. Nobody disagrees with anything about the whole of history. The reader needs the territory narrowed until something in it is visibly in dispute, and that usually takes two or three sentences, not a paragraph of background.
If the introduction's job is to set up the problem your essay solves, it follows that you cannot finish it until you know what the essay solves. Many students do not know that until they have drafted the essay. That is normal, and it is not a failure of planning. Drafting is one of the ways you find out what you think.
So treat the introduction you write first as scaffolding. Write it quickly, to give yourself a direction: a rough territory, a rough niche, a provisional claim. Then draft the body. When the draft is done, read your last paragraph. It is very often where the clearest statement of your argument has finally appeared, because by then you have done the thinking. Compare it with the claim in your opening. If they differ, the last paragraph is usually right, and the introduction has to be rewritten to set up that argument, with the niche it actually answers.
A useful check when you rewrite: read the introduction alone, then read only the first sentence of each body paragraph. The introduction should have made the reader expect roughly that sequence of moves. If the body argues something the introduction never raised, the reader will spend the first page waiting for an argument that is not coming, and they will meet the real one unprepared.
One more thing belongs here. Students are often told to "define the key terms" in the introduction, and some do so for every term in the question. Define a term when your argument depends on a particular meaning of it, especially a meaning other writers do not share. That is a niche in itself. A definition the reader did not need is more territory, and it pushes your claim further down the page.
Students are taught to summarise at the end, and the instinct behind it is sound: you want the reader to leave with the argument intact. But consider the reader's position at that moment. They have just read the essay. A paragraph that tells them what they read a minute ago gives them nothing new, and "In conclusion, this essay has shown…" signals that nothing new is coming. Most readers will skim it, and an examiner may skim it too.
The conclusion's job is different. It is the place where the essay states the consequence of its argument and not its content. Three questions help you find that consequence.
Burke's parlour is useful here too. In his account the discussion never ends: "The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress." A good conclusion is the moment you leave the room. You do not repeat your earlier speech to people who have just heard it. You tell them what your contribution changes for the people who stay, and you leave.
Return to the illustration. A summary conclusion would say that the essay has examined Stevens's narration and found his evasions to be deliberate. A conclusion that says what follows might note that if the evasions are choices, the novel's famous closing scenes read differently: what looks like a late discovery becomes a late admission. That sentence could not be stapled to anyone else's essay. It depends on this argument, and it tells the reader what the argument was for.
The two paragraphs are not independent. The introduction opens a problem and the conclusion reports what became of it. So read them together, one after the other, with the body set aside.
Do they make sense as a pair? The question raised in the first should be the question resolved in the last. If the introduction opens a niche about Stevens's blindness and the conclusion talks about the decline of the English country house, the essay has drifted somewhere between the two, and the reader will notice even if you did not.
They should also differ. If the last paragraph merely repeats the first in different words, the body has done no work: the reader ends exactly where they began. Between the two, something should have moved. The claim should be firmer, or narrower, or more exact, or turned in a direction the reader did not expect. One way to check is to ask whether the conclusion could have been written before the body. If it could, it is a second introduction.
The template has defenders, and their case deserves to be heard in full.
The template exists for good reasons. Beginners need a shape before they can manage a function, just as a music student practises scales before playing pieces. Under exam conditions, with forty minutes and a question seen for the first time, a student does not have time to find a niche and write the introduction twice. A shape that reliably produces an opening and a closing is a real help to a nervous writer. Mark schemes often reward a clear thesis statement and a summary conclusion, so a student who follows the template is giving the examiner what the examiner has been told to look for. And in long work, a dissertation or a report, a summary at the end is useful, because readers do forget what they read thirty pages earlier.
I grant most of it. Shapes are useful to beginners, and I would not take the three-part form away from anyone. Wesley did not either. An exam is not the place for a second draft. And a reader of a long document does need to be reminded where the argument has been before being told where it leads.
But look at what each of these concessions depends on. The scale analogy is right that practice comes before performance, but scales are practised as music: a student who plays them without knowing what a key is has learned finger positions, not harmony. A template taught with its functions explained does no harm. One taught as a set of slots to fill is what produces the interchangeable paragraph. As for the exam: finding the niche takes less time than writing a paragraph of background. Under pressure, three sentences that say what is usually thought, what is wrong with it, and what you will argue are faster to write than a funnel, and they tell the examiner at once that you have understood the question. That is usually what the mark scheme's "clear thesis" is trying to find.
The long-document point is the most interesting, because it shows what this essay is really claiming. In a forty-page report a summary in the conclusion has a function: it restores to the reader what they have lost over the distance. A function is the test. In a two-thousand-word essay that function does not exist, because the reader has lost nothing yet. The same summary is a move in one document and a frame in another. My advice is not "never summarise." It is to ask, for each paragraph, what that paragraph does for this reader at this point in this essay. The template answers that question once, in advance, for all essays. Only you can answer it for yours.
On this account, the two paragraphs students fear most become the two they can most easily diagnose. The introduction succeeds when the reader knows which quarrel they have walked into and where you stand in it. The conclusion succeeds when the reader knows what your contribution changes. Both can be checked by the swap test: neither should survive being stapled to somebody else's essay.
None of this makes the opening easier to write. What it does is show where the difficulty lies. The hard part of a first paragraph is not finding a lively first sentence. It is deciding, before the reader has heard a word, what the disagreement is, and the hard part of the last paragraph is deciding what your answer to it changes. Those are both decisions about the argument, which is why no template can make them for you.
Burke's latecomer listens, puts in an oar, argues for a while, and leaves with the discussion still going. The people still in the room do not need to hear the latecomer's speech again. What they keep is whatever it changed.
Burke, K. (1941). The philosophy of literary form: Studies in symbolic action, pp. 110–111. The parlour passage is reproduced in Kairos 2.1: https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/burke.htm
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press. Summary of the CARS model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARS_model
Wesley, K. (2000). The ill effects of the five paragraph theme. English Journal, 90(1), 57–60. ERIC record EJ614411: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ614411
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