Writing a Conclusion with an Evaluative “Punch”: A Linguistic Perspective

Writing a persuasive conclusion might be challenging to novice academic writers, who receive general advice such as “restating the thesis” and “providing a final comment”. The resulting conclusion might be overly descriptive. In light of this, the present paper investigates the effective evaluative strategies in the conclusion of 20 high-scored five-paragraph essays produced by associate degree business students from Hong Kong community college. The analysis of the present paper adopts Systemic Functional Linguistics, a theory seeking to link linguistic form with meaning associated with its functions in a text. The particular analytical focus is that of interpersonal meaning, the language features functioning to express evaluation and (dis-)engage readers in a text. The findings highlight the main language resources that express the comments on the topic in the conclusion, including features for adjusting certainty and obligation (e.g. modality), modifying authorial positioning (e.g. comment adjuncts) and articulating the writer’s attitude (e.g. evaluative lexis). These findings aim to elucidate the writing advice on giving comments with linguistic grounding, which can potentially be resources for enabling novice writers to close their essays with a compelling evaluative “punch”, i.e. insights that resonate or even reinforce the overall stance of the essays.