in conclusion

How to spot it

Look at the first few words of the closing paragraph. A conclusion marker is a phrase like in conclusion, to sum up, or at the end of the day, and it has one job: it tells a reader that a summary is starting. Cross the phrase out and read the paragraph again from the next word. If the paragraph still lands where it was going and nothing about it got harder to follow, the phrase was announcing an ending rather than delivering one.

What the test catches is the gap between the promise and the goods. In conclusion promises that everything before it is about to be gathered into something a reader can carry away. Sometimes the sentence that follows does the gathering. Often it restates the claim the piece already made, one size flatter, and the phrase is the only part still working. A frame marker is not an argument. It is a sign pointing at where the argument ought to be.

Where the marker sits is worth noticing too. A writer who has actually finished thinking puts the signal where a reader needs it, after a long stretch that is hard to hold in the head all at once. A reflexive marker turns up after a page short enough to recite from memory, and it turns up because the piece had to stop somewhere.

Why models overdo it

Arriving at a last paragraph, a model has made no decision that the argument is finished. It is choosing the next word by how likely that word is, and after a stretch of prose shaped like an ending, the likeliest opening in the language is the one that announces an ending. The phrase is available before the summary exists. That is the trouble: the signal can be produced first and the substance improvised behind it, which is the reverse of how a person arrives at a conclusion.

The second reason is cost. An ending that earns its place means going back through the argument and deciding which parts a reader should leave holding, and that is slow work. Nothing in the drafting process is keeping a ledger of what the reader was promised. The marker is free, it still reads as authoritative, so it keeps arriving. The habit is a tic; a piece that reaches for the phrase every single time is telling you the ending was assembled rather than reached.

When it's fine

The phrase is a tool, and it works whenever a reader genuinely cannot hold the argument without help.

Arlen Specter used it in 2006, deep into a long day of testimony, and he used it while making a joke about it, calling in conclusion the two most popular words of any presentation. The joke is fair and the phrase still earned its keep. A committee room full of people who cannot flip back a page has to be told that the questioning is over, and the marker is how a chairman hands the floor back. Nobody there minded.

Frederick Douglass reached for the same signal in 1852, near the end of an address that had been running for well over an hour. It tells an audience that the indictment is finished and something else is coming. Chesterton used it mid-book rather than at the end, which is the other honest case: gathering one thread before picking up the next. Length is the test, not taste. A long speech or a long report, and a reader will thank you for the flag. Two tidy paragraphs, and the flag is the only thing you added.

When the phrase goes, the ending still has to come from somewhere, and the plainest closers need no announcement. End on the consequence: the canal made the town rich for thirty years and then left it stranded inland, and nobody needs telling that the story is over. Give the one fact a reader should carry out of the room, state it once, and leave it alone. Answer the question the opening asked, in a sentence that could not have come first. Or close on what happens next, whether a vote still to come or a marquee booked for next year. Each of these does the gathering the marker only promises, which is why none of them needs a sign in front of it.

Where it comes from

Speech got there first. Classical rhetoric divided an oration into parts, and the last of them had a name of its own: the peroratio in Latin, the epilogos in Greek. Its job was to gather the case and land the close, and an orator was expected to announce that section rather than simply run out of things to say. That made sense in a room. A listener cannot turn back a page, cannot see how much is left, and has only the speaker's voice to tell him where he stands, so saying the joint out loud is the only way to make a shape audible.

The convention moved onto the page largely intact, and the classroom kept it breathing. Composition courses file in conclusion, summing up, and on the whole under transitional devices, shelved beside the phrases for adding a fact or drawing a contrast, and students learn to close on one because it is the safe move. Researchers who study how writers steer a reader's attention gave the habit its own name: a frame marker, a phrase that announces a stage of the writing rather than adding anything to it.

Individual wordings carry their own histories, and they are older than they look. At the end of the day was literal long before it was figurative, but the figurative sense runs back to the 1820s, arriving through sermons and theological quarterlies rather than through rhetoric. The dictionary that now labels the phrase hackneyed cites nothing earlier than the 1970s. So the family is old and various, and none of them was ever the problem. What is new is a writing process that can raise the flag without ever having built the thing it flies over.