I. The “Guide to Grammar and Writing” website warns of four ways not to conclude a paper or report. The first temptation authors should avoid is “to finish with a sentimental flourish” even when a paper provides persuasive argument for a call to action. The website also cautions that “the conclusion is no place to bring up new ideas.” Altogether new material should be set aside for another paper, even if there’s considerable groundwork for it in the paper that is almost complete. The third warning is to avoid the temptation to apologize for a paper’s conclusions, and the fourth is the temptation to give short shrift to a topic that the introduction or an early part of the paper promised readers would be covered. (If you’ve omitted promised information, either remove the promise or go back into the paper and live up to it.)
The website’s suggestions for approaches to a proper ending:
• A brief summary of the paper’s main points
• A provocative question
• A thought-provoking quotation
• A vivid image
• A call for some sort of action
• A warning
• Correlation of the paper’s findings to more universal situations
II. Many grammar blogs and websites point out that the old prohibition against ending sentences with prepositions is not a logically grounded rule but more of a myth that was born suddenly in the late 1600s when English poet John Dryden and an influential book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, embraced a trendy notion that Latin is such a bedrock language that writers in other languages should imitate it in every way possible. Although Latin sentences never end in prepositions, the English language has a different structure and cumbersome wording that results from avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence isn’t clear writing in a language in which clarity depends on terminal prepositions in some sentences.
III. An online technical writing guide by a writer who spent more than a decade teaching technical writing at the University of Texas, David A. McMurrey, has summaries of four primary ways to end a report: a summary, a true conclusion, an afterword and nothing.
McMurrey counsels against ending a document with no conclusion, because “in most cases, that’s a bit like slamming the phone down without even saying good-bye.” He recommends summaries for “long, complex or heavily detailed reports and times when it’s important for readers to come away with a certain perspective.” He says that for short reports on the other hand, “summaries can seem absurd” because the material is fresh in the reader’s mind. Reports that present and weigh out alternative points of view and conflicting data cry out to end in a “True” conclusion that presents the author’s final choices, and concise explanations of why. A report conclusion that’s an afterword is one that turns from material presented to discussion of a related topic at a general level. A report detailing equipment for a proposed lab might appropriately conclude with something of an afterword that hits on major areas of research that the new lab will make possible. McMurrey says “the key is to keep it general—don’t force yourself into a whole new detailed section.”
IV. So many grammar bloggers and columnists are unhappy with the persistence presences of keystroked sentences with two spaces after the terminal period that it’s now obvious the gaff isn’t restricted to writers old enough to have picked up the misinformation while using a typewriter. Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist for the New York Times, despairs that he’s not only grown weary of removing extra spaces when editing email for his tech-advice column, but also concerned that “the public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I’ve received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces.”
Manual and older electric typewriters give equal amounts of horizontal space to all characters, which led to extra spaces after period-ending sentences enhancing readability, as readers could tell at a glance what was a complete thought. With only a few exceptions, the fonts on computer screens and those output by printers are give varying amounts of horizontal space to different letters, and horizontal spacing changes contingent on characters before and after, and that reflect the purpose for many special characters. The extra space after a period-ending sentence overrides the font design and thus diminishes readability instead of enhancing it.