Teaching Introductions and Conclusions

Activities for Teaching the Introduction

Most students can recognize a powerful introductory paragraph. They’ll talk about what grabs their attention, what pulls them in, and what turns them off. You can set up an activity to discuss different types of introductions just by considering the different readings you’ve been discussing in class. Or, consider reproducing several opening paragraphs from student drafts and distributing them for class discussion. Ask students to name what caught their attention and what didn’t. Which of these drafts would they like to keep reading? Why? This is a good way to generate a list of qualities that the class agrees contribute to a successful or powerful introductory paragraph.

Ask students to consider questions like these: Should an introduction tell a story? Should it lay out what the writer is going to discuss in the rest of the paper? Should it ask a question? Should it provide a vivid description so that the reader feels like he/she is there with the writer? Should it shock the reader into continuing? Should it begin with a quotation? Clearly, all of these strategies are possibilities for the writing you’re asking your students to do. But telling a story won’t work for all types of papers for all types of audiences.

Another activity you might try is to have students analyze the various introductory paragraphs from the readings you’ve been discussing along with newspaper articles or novels or anything else students want to bring in. Then, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to discuss why, for example, the leading question works well x but not for y.

One of my most successful large-group activities involved students reading aloud a paper written by one of their classmates (reproduced anonymously, of course) with the conclusion to the paper cut off. I had chosen this particular paper because its conclusion was so remarkably in conflict with the rest of what the student had written. To give a crudely simple summary, the student had written about his horrific experiences as a student in Catholic schools in the mid-60’s; in vivid detail he described, for example, watching a classmate fall down the stairs and the pool of blood at the bottom (clearly the paper was vivid enough for me to remember this example). Then, in the conclusion to the paper, the student wrote that despite all that the nuns had put him and his classmates through, he still held a great deal of respect for them. I saw a teachable moment here: I wanted students to consider the often unspoken desire (need?) for that sense of uplifted closure at the end of an academic essay.

So, after students had read the paper minus the conclusion, I asked everyone to compose a conclusion to the paper. This activity could be altered to be used in small groups in which they collaborate on the writing of a single conclusion. Once they’d all composed, I simply asked them to go around the room and read what they had written. As I said, I still think of this day as one of the my most successful days of teaching. To listen to the conclusions they’d written and to see the look of comprehension come over the writer’s face was priceless. We discussed what they’d written, making connections and generalizations about what a conclusion does in a paper. It’s funny. I got the feeling that most students couldn’t really see the point of the activity; it was all pretty straightforward until I passed out the original conclusion the author had composed. Then they got it right away. We talked about the conventions driving the writing of conclusions and the difficulty they’d all had writing conclusions that didn’t smack of happy endings in their own papers.

This activity can easily be altered for different purposes. I think the important aspects of it are that

1. it allows students to experiment when the stakes are relatively low;
2. it encourages collaboration;
3. it build community because often these activities are so memorable for students; and
4. it illustrates a writing challenge that most all students have experienced more than once. In other words, students see the relevance right away.

Developed by Amy Robillard, CCR PhD student