What Should Happen in Conclusions?

Rule #6: Scholarly writing changes the readers' world, and its conclusions have consequences.  In an academic paper, never, ever, merely restate what you believe you have proven.  Take seriously the demand your writing has made on your readers and consider the consequences of their agreement with your thesis.

        Conclusions, like introductions, often require serious and deep thinking before writers can undertake their revision.  Anyone can slap together a simple "restatement" conclusion, but it takes time to end a document with a logical appraisal of the next necessary steps readers must take.  Give your writing time to cool down.  Get another opinion of your thesis and support.  Talk about possibilities and probabilities that occur to you if the thesis is correct, and persuasive.  What will readers probably do if they believe you?  What might they do?  What should they do?  These are questions which can help to develop conclusions which grow organically from the arguments they conclude.

Here are some functions conclusions can serve, depending on what kind of argument you are constructing:

Project the thesis beyond the immediate context into some distant or wider context.

• from a thesis about anencephalic transplants in the U.S. A. to its implications for all transplants in the U.S.A.;
• from a thesis about killing in self defense to its implications for all violent self defense;
• from a thesis about Providence gun shops to its implications for all gun shops in the nation;
• from a thesis about fan-fiction novels to its implications for creative web-based short films based on pre-existing movies

Call for specific corrective action and/or name the parties with the greatest responsibility or benefit to take that action.

• Parents should be informed about the possibility of infant organ donation and hospitals should inform them; or, parents should be informed but it's in the recipient parents' best interests to do it.
• Gunshops deserve special protection and police should protect them; or they deserve protection but the police are too slow, so shop owners should share the burden to create security details
• Intellectual property law should respect the rights of anyone who creates a new work that contributes "significant, new and independently developed content or treatment" to a previous novel or film (defining carefully "significant," "new," and "independently developed," as well as giving tests for distinguishing "content" from "treatment").

Redirect future research to make possible the next step toward solving the problem your thesis has identified or helped to explain.

• Increasing shortages of anencephalic donors mean a replacement must be found, so more research in xenotransplants (from other species) and in artificial organ growth/manufacture must be pursued.
• Protecting gunshops from criminals is an expensive and uncertain proposition, but research to prevent criminal behavior could make crimes against gunshops less likely.
• Even if we cannot currently solve the problem of whose rights to protect, the original works' authors' rights or the rights of the "fan" works' authors, we still could help clarify the debate if we could determine what would constitute "significant independently developed content or treatment," because those terms are crucial to both groups' of authors' claims to have invented something new that deserves protection (vs. all of them being "knockoffs" of some prior work!)