Write As Historian: WRITE AS A HISTORIAN: WRITE THE CONCLUSION
A strong conclusion helps create unity by circling back to the ideas in your introduction and thesis statement. The conclusion is also a good opportunity to extend and refine the complex understanding you have developed and woven throughout your essay.
Providing Unity While wrapping up your essay with a return to the ideas in your introduction helps provide unity, simply restating your thesis is not a strong way to end the essay. Suppose your thesis is that the main causes of the end of the Cold War were the decline in communist ideology and the weakness of the Soviet economy. Avoid simply restating it (“Thus we can see that the decline of communist ideology and the weakness of the Soviet economy were the main causes of the end of the Cold War”). Instead, you might say, “Although many factors led to the end of the Cold War, including Gorbachev’s efforts at reform and the development of communication technologies that allowed for the rapid spread of liberal ideas, most served to feed the two main causes—declining support for communism and a faltering Soviet economy.” This change extends the thesis statement rather than simply repeating it.
Demonstrating Complexity An extension of your thesis statement such as the one above also helps demonstrate a complex understanding of the topic by referring to multiple causes. The College Board identifies the following ways to demonstrate a complex understanding: “Corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument using diverse and alternative evidence in order to develop a complex argument.” You might, for example, analyze multiple variables to arrive at a nuanced conclusion: “Economic, ideological, political, social, and religious factors all played a role in the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.” You might make a connection within or across regions: “A democracy movement was building in China as well, but China used military force to put it down, while Gorbachev decided not to use military force.”
Other ways you can demonstrate a complex understanding are to consider the significance of a source’s credibility and limitations and explain why a historical argument is or is not effective. Most of the development of your complex understanding must be done within the body of your essay for you to earn the point for complexity, but you can use the conclusion to summarize or extend that understanding.
Application: Review the sample scored essays on the College Board website. Evaluate the conclusion of each sample. For any that lack a conclusion, draft one that would provide unity to the essay and summarize a complex understanding of the historical development that is the focus of the prompt.
For current free response question samples, visit https://apcentral. collegeboard.org/courses/ap-world-history/exam