How to Teach Introductions and Conclusions in Secondary ELA
Every beginning writer learns, “You need a hook and a thesis statement for your introduction. In your conclusion, revisit your hook and thesis statement and provide additional insight.” There you have it: “How to teach introductions and conclusions.” Done. Let’s move on to body paragraphs.
It’s been the approach since the dawn of time (or at least as long as we’ve been in school), but every proficient writer knows this is not how you write a good intro and conclusion. Sure there’s some basis in truth here, but a good hook is not so easy to write, and “revisiting” a hook and thesis statement with “additional insight” is much easier said than done.
We spend a lot of time in ELA classrooms teaching students how to write thesis statements (that’s enough focus on the intro, right?), how to punctuate and integrate quotations, and how to write commentary. And this makes sense: not only are these the building blocks of any well-crafted argument, they are also relatively easy to give students rules and formulas for. But when our students want to know how to write a good intro and conclusion? We sometimes get a little bit stuck, resort to the quick hook—thesis—revisit—additional insight summary, or skip it because it seems hard and it’s not that important.

And yet not knowing how to write a good intro and conclusion can feel like an insurmountable obstacle to our students, whether it’s because they just don’t know what to write or they really do want to write an effective essay (that, if you teach AP, earns the coveted “sophistication point”).
We struggled to figure out how to teach introductions and conclusions for the same reasons our students struggle with them (Read: hard, doesn’t feel that important). We’ve typically excelled at those areas of writing instruction improved by understanding various rules, tricks, and strategies that they can pull out of their scholarly toolboxes. The creative, personal nature of these two paragraphs often defied our best attempts to help students move beyond repetitive and boring.
After a lot of trial and error, we figured out how to teach introductions and conclusions in a way that was systematic but also led to slightly more meaningful writing from students, and if you’re struggling to show your students how to write a good intro and conclusion, we hope you’ll find them helpful as well.
How to Teach Introductions and Conclusions in 6 Easy Steps
Introductions: 3 Key Elements
Hook
Most students have received instruction on how to write a hook, yet they still find it the most challenging part of any essay. If your students are like ours, they can spend an entire class period staring at a blank screen because they just don’t know what to say. (Heaven forbid they skip it and come back to it later!
It’s not groundbreaking to suggest that students begin their essay with a startling fact, quotation, anecdote, or generalization, but these are the types of hooks we encourage our students to use. If students are particularly stuck, we suggest they start with a phrase like “Imagine you’re . . .” or make a connection to a TV show or movie with similar themes. Our hard and fast rule? NO. QUESTIONS. After years of reading hooks like, “Have you ever had to overcome an obstacle? Well, Elie Wiesel did,” we decided our students were capable of being more creative.
The hook, though, is the one sentence for which we always refuse to give students a sentence starter. Creativity is hard, but it’s important, and we insist they own, free and clear, at least this one part of the writing process.
Context
After the hook, we ask students to write a context sentence (or two) introducing the text or issue they are writing about. Most of the time, our students are (at least tangentially) writing about a text, so we ask them to include their TAG (title, author, genre) and a 1–2 sentence summary of the text. This still works when you’re not writing about a text; students can provide background information about the topic they will be addressing.
Thesis Statement
We could write an entire blog post about crafting good thesis statements, but we emphasize the importance of placing the thesis statement at the end of the introduction paragraph, not because you can’t put it somewhere else, but because when you’re writing an essay that will be scored using a rubric, it’s helpful to locate it where it can’t be missed. We also focus on the importance of making a clear, specific, and arguable statement that answers the question in the prompt.
Conclusions: 3 Key Elements
Restated Thesis/Revisited Hook
We ask students, as many do, to begin their conclusion with a restated thesis: remind your reader what you have argued, but try to say it in different words than your original. We often provide students with sentence starters to help them get started on rearranging their ideas and to move away from beginning with “In conclusion.” Another strategy you can use here is to have your students revisit their hook as they craft their restated thesis. Not only does this help them state the thesis in a new way, it guides them toward writing hooks that are more meaningful and connected to their argument.
Synthesis Sentence
After the thesis, students place their thesis in the larger context. Because most of our essays are text-based, this often means considering how their specific claim (often about a specific character or theme) fits into the larger picture. Here are some examples:
- For an essay about The Odyssey in which students’ thesis statements make a claim about the ancient Greek ideal reflected in the text, students “explain how everything you have written in your essay about Odysseus’s hero’s journey reflects the ancient Greek ideal you have selected.”
- For an essay about The Odyssey in which students identify whether Odysseus can be considered a hero by both ancient Greek and modern standards, students “explain how everything you have written in your essay about Odysseus reflects his status as a hero in the two cultures.”
- For an essay about Unbroken in which students’ thesis statements make a claim about character traits in Louie Zamperini’s childhood that impacted his experiences as an adult, students “explain for the reader the impact Louie’s pre-war experiences had on his war and post-war experiences.”
- For an essay about Romeo and Juliet in which students’ thesis statements make a claim about which character bears the most responsibility for the three deaths in the play’s final scene, students “explain for the reader the impact your character(s)’ decisions/circumstances had on the three young lives in the play.”
“So What” Sentence

We ask students to end their essay by considering why the ideas or themes they presented are worth considering by a larger audience or (in most cases) a modern reader. Why does this one character’s individual experience matter to larger audiences? Why does this presentation of another culture, historical event, or entirely made up world continue to resonate? Why were these ideas worth reading and writing about?
Learning how to write a good intro and conclusion continues to be a challenge for many students, but in considering how to teach introductions and conclusions, it was helpful for us to land on a structure that helps students consider the importance and context of their ideas without merely repeating themselves. Typically, over the course of the year, some students did begin to write more meaningful introductions and conclusions, especially in our PreAP and AP classes, and students felt more confident knowing they had a structure to fall back on.
What challenges have you faced when considering how to teach introductions and conclusions? What tricks and tips do you give your students when they ask how to write a good intro and conclusion? Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works with your ideas or to get more details about any of the ideas we’ve shared here.