Why Your Article Doesn't Need a "Conclusion"

Share

Around the internet, we find many bloggers, writers, and content creators, who write articles on a variety of subjects, curating, compiling, and editing information to share with the world. And a number of these articles share an awkward and unnecessary element in common: the "conclusion" section at the end of the article.

Now, there's nothing wrong with conclusions, concluding things and writing them in your own words is great, and even if your conclusions are completely wrong, the fact that you wrote them down may help someone else out, because you made your thoughts available for them.

However, many articles that have a "conclusion" aren't actually about a topic that can be simply concluded about. In school, you may have had to write essays where you picked a topic, wrote an introduction, elaborated on it, and then, at the end, you offered your conclusions. This three-part pattern may be a reason why so many articles have conclusions. Maybe you just want to pad text to make your article feel longer and you're just forcing yourself to come up with a conclusion to write. In any case, there's no rule that you HAVE to write a "conclusion," and, furthermore, there's no rule that your conclusions have to be under a heading that reads literally "conclusion." Even if you want to pad text by inserting your own thoughts into the article, you do not need to write the word "conclusion" in it.

For example, say you write a listicle about the "top 10 whatever." At first glance, there's no reason why such article should even have a conclusion. It just lists 10 things. What could you possibly conclude about it? That there exists, in fact, 10 things, and possibly even more? But in practice, depending on what the subject is, you may have formed thoughts about it that were left out of the article because it doesn't fit any single of the listed items. So your thoughts have to be in a separate section of their own. A section called... "conclusion"? No. That's, that's just wrong. Don't call it conclusion. Conclusion doesn't say anything about what the content of the section is about. A heading that makes the reader want to read beyond the top 10 things they came for.

For instance, if you're concluding that the bottom 5 are better than the top 5 in some cases, don't write "conclusion." Title your section "The Bottom 5 are Better Than The Top 5 in Some Cases" or "Why The Top Ones May Be Bad For You." If you're concluding something obvious like the fact he options are varied and there's one for everyone, write, literally, "The Options are Varied and There's One For Everyone" or just "There's One for Everyone." Don't make your heading "conclusion."

Conclusion

See how much this heading sucks? You don't like reading "conclusion" inside your head, do you? I think I've made my point. That concludes it.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *