Writing Conclusions

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

I’ll officially assign the reflective essays after the final Turing essays are due. But the gist of the reflective assignment will be to write a short (maybe 1 1/2 pages) reflection on how you’ve changed, or not, as a write this semester. There won’t be meetings with me to talk about draft and final versions, just a single version due via Google sharing or email sometime during finals.

Writing Conclusions

Purpose

What can or should a conclusion do?

• Summarize the essay, especially
  • Argument
  • Thesis
  • Motivation for the thesis or for writing the essay
• Introduce further ideas related to the essay, e.g., ideas that readers could now pursue, actions they could take, etc.
• Make connections to larger concepts, ideas, or conversations (could also be in introduction)

Example

The essay at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k9Pk5xZkmIIuFrdLVyr0rIq6KpDDff0g74nS73NtDOQ/edit?usp=sharing

is missing its conclusion. Read the essay, and try adding your own conclusion, or notes about what a conclusion might say.

(The essay is something I wrote 10 years or so ago on changes in computer science and how it’s taught; while there’s some background that you probably don’t have, you should be able to mostly follow it.)

Discussion:

• All the conclusions and notes identify important points for a summary of the essay.
• There are both optimistic and pessimistic views looking forward.
• One conclusion makes a nice move of calling attention to how successful leaders in other fields necessarily have some expertise in the foundations of those fields, to lead in to a reminder not to let future leaders in computing neglect the foundations of their field.

The actual conclusion (see the end of the Google document) and discussion or comments on it:

• It’s more a call to future action than a summary of the body of the essay.
• The final sentences set up two possible futures, the optimistic one and the pessimistic one. But note, in light of our previous discussion of logical fallacies, that there is a little bit of false dichotomy there: there are possible futures where pure computer science is neither completely ignored nor totally embraced.

Next

Is there $70 million worth of gold, silver, and jewels buried somewhere in Virginia?

Read the Beale Papers at http://www.unmuseum.org/bealepap.htm for Monday.

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