Writing: Task 2 Conclusion Techniques

A Task 2 conclusion has two jobs: synthesise the essay's main points, in language genuinely different from the introduction rather than a reshuffled version of the same sentences, and reaffirm your overall position with confidence, giving the reader a clear, final sense of the argument's shape. This matters for Coherence and Cohesion specifically, since a conclusion is where a reader checks whether the essay actually held together as one coherent argument or drifted across paragraphs — and it matters because a conclusion is disproportionately visible: it's the last thing an examiner reads before assigning a band, and a flat or repetitive close can undercut an otherwise well-developed essay's overall impression even though it isn't separately scored as its own criterion.

The core skill a conclusion requires is synthesis, not summary: genuinely strong conclusions restate the essay's argument at a slightly higher level of generality than the individual body paragraphs did, pulling the separate strands together into one coherent closing statement, rather than listing "first I said X, then I said Y" in sequence. If body paragraph one argued that remote work improves employee wellbeing and body paragraph two argued that it also reduces company costs, a merely summarising conclusion says "in conclusion, remote work improves wellbeing and reduces costs" — accurate, but just a compressed list. A synthesising conclusion instead connects the two: "Taken together, these benefits suggest that remote work offers a rare alignment of interests between employees and employers, which is likely why its adoption has continued even as some companies push for a return to the office." The second version demonstrates that you understood how your own points relate to each other, not just that you remembered what they were.

The single most common structural error is a conclusion that is recognisably the introduction with a few words swapped and the sentence order lightly reshuffled — if your introduction said "this essay will argue that the benefits of remote work outweigh the drawbacks" and your conclusion says "in conclusion, the benefits of remote work outweigh the drawbacks, as this essay has argued," a reader experiences this as the same sentence twice rather than as an argument that developed and arrived somewhere. The fix is genuinely re-expressing the position using different sentence structure and vocabulary, and ideally referencing the specific reasoning developed in the body paragraphs (as in the synthesis example above) rather than only the position itself.

A related but distinct error is introducing a brand new argument, piece of evidence, or qualification in the conclusion that was never raised or developed anywhere in the body paragraphs — for instance, closing an essay about remote work with "however, this may not apply equally to manufacturing jobs, which require physical presence" when manufacturing was never mentioned earlier in the essay. Even though this observation might be true and even insightful, introducing it for the first time in the conclusion reads as an afterthought rather than a considered part of the argument, since the conclusion's job is to close and synthesise the essay's existing content, not introduce fresh, undeveloped material at the last possible moment where there's no room left to actually develop it.