The place where I got tired of thinking.

My least favorite part of any writing endeavor is the end. Last impressions are as important as first impressions (and for the record, my second least favorite part of writing blog entries is coming up with a title), but I'm really not good at good endings, and I know this. At the risk of drawing your attention forevermore to the endings of my future blog posts, I will here share some of my blog-ending strategies from blog posts past:

Strategy 1: End with a recipe.
This strategy allows me to completely avoid the problem altogether, because recipes are allowed to end with boring lines like "Let stand 10 minutes before cutting," or "To serve, spoon polenta on plate and top with vegetables," or even "Serves 4."

Strategy 2: State the Moral of the Story.
I actually hate this ending but I do it a lot. Someone pointed out to me awhile back that in my blog I often take mundane things and turn them into a reflection on bigger life themes. I don't do this consciously, it's just kind of what often happens, but while this tendency was pointed out to me as a good thing (I think), it can make for cheesy final lines like, "That's what makes a successful trip," or "This is why I like teaching," or "We are not alone in this world."

Strategy 3: Wish good thoughts on all my readers.
Any lame ending can be remedied with a nice seasonal shout-out to my readers: "Happy Easter!" or "Happy summer!" or "Happy Monday!" or "Happy March 16!"

Strategy 4: Get all sentimental.
I do have a sentimental streak. As some of my blog posts spiral toward the end, they leave me feeling grateful, emotional, even sometimes a little teary-eyed, and whether or not it brings proper closure to the topic, no one's going to argue with a heartfelt thank you to someone or everyone for touching my life.

Strategy 5: Put it back on the reader's shoulders.
If I can't think of a good ending, I can always just throw a question back at the readers. This can backfire because, for some odd reason, many readers are less likely to respond when they are actually asked to do so. But acting as though I'm opening the topic up for a stimulating reader discussion allows me to avoid an ending altogether.

Strategy 6: End with a picture.
My thinking on this one is that maybe if I end with a pretty picture, by the time people finish looking at it they will forget the awkward ending that preceded the image.

Strategy 7: Just end it.
These are the final lines that just scream, I have no good way to end this thing. Lines like, "There you have it." Or "I can't think of how to end this so I'll just stop here."

Recently I was faced with the challenge of ending my dissertation. If ending a 500-word blog post is challenging, ending a 59,528-word dissertation is even more so. I feel like I should end it with a punch: This is why it matters that I wrote the whole darned thing in the first place. But with 59,528 words worth of material swimming around, half the time I'm not really I can remember what I wrote in the first place, let alone why.

Today I went back and re-read the final chapter of my dissertation to help myself focus on how to boil everything down into a 20-minute presentation for my defense next week, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was happier with the last chapter than I remembered being 2 weeks ago. But I tell you this: my very last paragraph is lame:

As a largely untouched area of research, but an important site for understanding and improving the mathematical education of teachers, community college mathematics courses for elementary teachers are a potentially fruitful field with many promising research possibilities.

The end. Lame, lame, lame.

The problem is, none of my tried-and-true strategies for making an ending slightly less lame seem to work in this case:

Strategy 1: End with a recipe.
I have to admit, I kind of really like the idea of getting to the end of my dissertation and saying, "In conclusion, I would like to share my recipe for chocolate chip cookies." And I wonder if Rackham* would notice if I snuck my chocolate chip cookie recipe in as one of the appendices. I'm half-tempted to try.

Strategy 2: State the Moral of the Story.
Don't tell my committee, but I'm not really sure what the moral of my dissertation story is. At least, not in a summing-it-up-in-one sentence sense. The real moral of the story is what my master's thesis advisor told me five years ago: your thesis/dissertation is done when it needs to be done - no sooner and no later. I know a lot of people for whom this moral did not hold true (on the "no later" side of the moral), so maybe if I write the moral into my dissertation it will force it into truthfulness for me.

Strategy 3: Wish good thoughts on all my readers.
"Happy dissertation defense, everyone!" Awkward and ambiguous. I'm trying to wish a happy my dissertation defense, which really doesn't make sense to wish on anyone but myself.

Strategy 4: Get all sentimental.
This actually isn't all that unusual for inclusion in a dissertation. Rackham tells you it's optional, but everyone includes acknowledgments and thanks - usually to their chair, sometimes to participants or collaborators, and often to family. But since it's already built in to the dissertation at the very beginning (according to the strict Rackham guidelines) it doesn't help much with my ending problem.

Strategy 5: Put it back on the reader's shoulders.
This one's kind of appealing too. "But that's enough of my (200+ pages of) insights on the topic. What do you think?"

Strategy 6: End with a picture.

Yeah.

Strategy 7: Just end it.
That's basically what I've done, just without the self-awareness that makes the "just end it" strategy feel more comfortable. I could add in a little more self-awareness, something along the lines of, "Really, nothing more needs to be said." Or how about, "If you don't believe me, you didn't read my dissertation"?


So now I come to the awkward task of having to end a blog entry about the difficulty of writing interesting endings. There is no way I'm going to be able to pull this one off. So I'm just going to let myself off the hook this time and end it here without too much ado.

(Can you guess which strategy I used?)



* UM's school of graduate studies.