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How to Conclude an Essay (with Examples)

Last Updated: April 3, 2023 Fact Checked

Writing a Strong Conclusion

What to avoid, brainstorming tricks.

This article was co-authored by Jake Adams and by wikiHow staff writer, Aly Rusciano . Jake Adams is an academic tutor and the owner of Simplifi EDU, a Santa Monica, California based online tutoring business offering learning resources and online tutors for academic subjects K-College, SAT & ACT prep, and college admissions applications. With over 14 years of professional tutoring experience, Jake is dedicated to providing his clients the very best online tutoring experience and access to a network of excellent undergraduate and graduate-level tutors from top colleges all over the nation. Jake holds a BS in International Business and Marketing from Pepperdine University. There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 3,201,971 times.

So, you’ve written an outstanding essay and couldn’t be more proud. But now you have to write the final paragraph. The conclusion simply summarizes what you’ve already written, right? Well, not exactly. Your essay’s conclusion should be a bit more finessed than that. Luckily, you’ve come to the perfect place to learn how to write a conclusion. We’ve put together this guide to fill you in on everything you should and shouldn’t do when ending an essay. Follow our advice, and you’ll have a stellar conclusion worthy of an A+ in no time.

Things You Should Know

• Rephrase your thesis to include in your final paragraph to bring the essay full circle.
• End your essay with a call to action, warning, or image to make your argument meaningful.
• Keep your conclusion concise and to the point, so you don’t lose a reader’s attention.
• Do your best to avoid adding new information to your conclusion and only emphasize points you’ve already made in your essay.

• “All in all”
• “Ultimately”
• “Furthermore”
• “As a consequence”
• “As a result”

• Make sure to write your main points in a new and unique way to avoid repetition.

• Let’s say this is your original thesis statement: “Allowing students to visit the library during lunch improves campus life and supports academic achievement.”
• Restating your thesis for your conclusion could look like this: “Evidence shows students who have access to their school’s library during lunch check out more books and are more likely to complete their homework.”
• The restated thesis has the same sentiment as the original while also summarizing other points of the essay.

• “When you use plastic water bottles, you pollute the ocean. Switch to using a glass or metal water bottle instead. The planet and sea turtles will thank you.”
• “The average person spends roughly 7 hours on their phone a day, so there’s no wonder cybersickness is plaguing all generations.”
• “Imagine walking on the beach, except the soft sand is made up of cigarette butts. They burn your feet but keep washing in with the tide. If we don’t clean up the ocean, this will be our reality.”
• “ Lost is not only a show that changed the course of television, but it’s also a reflection of humanity as a whole.”
• “If action isn’t taken to end climate change today, the global temperature will dangerously rise from 4.5 to 8 °F (−15.3 to −13.3 °C) by 2100.”

• Focus on your essay's most prevalent or important parts. What key points do you want readers to take away or remember about your essay?

• For instance, instead of writing, “That’s why I think that Abraham Lincoln was the best American President,” write, “That’s why Abraham Lincoln was the best American President.”
• There’s no room for ifs, ands, or buts—your opinion matters and doesn’t need to be apologized for!

• For instance, words like “firstly,” “secondly,” and “thirdly” may be great transition statements for body paragraphs but are unnecessary in a conclusion.

• For instance, say you began your essay with the idea that humanity’s small sense of sense stems from space’s vast size. Try returning to this idea in the conclusion by emphasizing that as human knowledge grows, space becomes smaller.

• For example, you could extend an essay on the television show Orange is the New Black by bringing up the culture of imprisonment in America.

Community Q&A

• Always review your essay after writing it for proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and don’t be afraid to revise. Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 1
• Ask a friend, family member, or teacher for help if you’re stuck. Sometimes a second opinion is all you need. Thanks Helpful 2 Not Helpful 1

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.uts.edu.au/current-students/support/helps/self-help-resources/grammar/transition-signals
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/argument_papers/conclusions.html
• ↑ http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/conclude.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/ending-essay-conclusions
• ↑ https://www.pittsfordschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=542&dataid=4677&FileName=conclusions1.pdf
• ↑ https://www.cuyamaca.edu/student-support/tutoring-center/files/student-resources/how-to-write-a-good-conclusion.pdf
• ↑ https://library.sacredheart.edu/c.php?g=29803&p=185935

About This Article

To end an essay, start your conclusion with a phrase that makes it clear your essay is coming to a close, like "In summary," or "All things considered." Then, use a few sentences to briefly summarize the main points of your essay by rephrasing the topic sentences of your body paragraphs. Finally, end your conclusion with a call to action that encourages your readers to do something or learn more about your topic. In general, try to keep your conclusion between 5 and 7 sentences long. For more tips from our English co-author, like how to avoid common pitfalls when writing an essay conclusion, scroll down! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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5 Examples of Concluding Words for Essays

4-minute read

• 19th September 2022

If you’re a student writing an essay or research paper, it’s important to make sure your points flow together well. You’ll want to use connecting words (known formally as transition signals) to do this. Transition signals like thus , also , and furthermore link different ideas, and when you get to the end of your work, you need to use these to mark your conclusion. Read on to learn more about transition signals and how to use them to conclude your essays.

Transition Signals

Transition signals link sentences together cohesively, enabling easy reading and comprehension. They are usually placed at the beginning of a sentence and separated from the remaining words with a comma. There are several types of transition signals, including those to:

●  show the order of a sequence of events (e.g., first, then, next)

●  introduce an example (e.g., specifically, for instance)

●  indicate a contrasting idea (e.g., but, however, although)

●  present an additional idea (e.g., also, in addition, plus)

●  indicate time (e.g., beforehand, meanwhile, later)

●  compare (e.g., likewise, similarly)

●  show cause and effect (e.g., thus, as a result)

●  mark the conclusion – which we’ll focus on in this guide.

When you reach the end of an essay, you should start the concluding paragraph with a transition signal that acts as a bridge to the summary of your key points. Check out some concluding transition signals below and learn how you can use them in your writing.

To Conclude…

This is a particularly versatile closing statement that can be used for almost any kind of essay, including both formal and informal academic writing. It signals to the reader that you will briefly restate the main idea. As an alternative, you can begin the summary with “to close” or “in conclusion.” In an argumentative piece, you can use this phrase to indicate a call to action or opinion:

To conclude, Abraham Lincoln was the best president because he abolished slavery.

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As Has Been Demonstrated…

To describe how the evidence presented in your essay supports your argument or main idea, begin the concluding paragraph with “as has been demonstrated.” This phrase is best used for research papers or articles with heavy empirical or statistical evidence.

As has been demonstrated by the study presented above, human activities are negatively altering the climate system.

The Above Points Illustrate…

As another transitional phrase for formal or academic work, “the above points illustrate” indicates that you are reiterating your argument and that the conclusion will include an assessment of the evidence you’ve presented.

The above points illustrate that children prefer chocolate over broccoli.

In a Nutshell…

A simple and informal metaphor to begin a conclusion, “in a nutshell” prepares the reader for a summary of your paper. It can work in narratives and speeches but should be avoided in formal situations.

In a nutshell, the Beatles had an impact on musicians for generations to come.

Overall, It Can Be Said…

To recap an idea at the end of a critical or descriptive essay, you can use this phrase at the beginning of the concluding paragraph. “Overall” means “taking everything into account,” and it sums up your essay in a formal way. You can use “overall” on its own as a transition signal, or you can use it as part of a phrase.

Overall, it can be said that art has had a positive impact on humanity.

Proofreading and Editing

Transition signals are crucial to crafting a well-written and cohesive essay. For your next writing assignment, make sure you include plenty of transition signals, and check out this post for more tips on how to improve your writing. And before you turn in your paper, don’t forget to have someone proofread your work. Our expert editors will make sure your essay includes all the transition signals necessary for your writing to flow seamlessly. Send in a free 500-word sample today!

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How to End a College Admissions Essay | 4 Winning Strategies

Published on October 16, 2021 by Meredith Testa . Revised on May 31, 2023.

The ending of your college essay should leave your reader with a sense of closure and a strong final impression.

Table of contents

Endings to avoid, option 1: return to the beginning, option 2: look forward, option 3: reveal your main point, option 4: end on an action, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

A bad conclusion can bring your whole essay down, so make sure to avoid these common mistakes.

Summarizing

Unlike an academic essay, an admissions essay shouldn’t restate your points. Avoid ending with a summary; there’s no need to repeat what you’ve already written.

Phrases like “in conclusion,” “overall,” or “to sum it up” signal that you have nothing to add to what you’ve already written, so an admissions officer may stop reading.

Stating the obvious

Instead of stating the obvious, let your work speak for itself and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. If your essay details various times that you worked tirelessly to go above and beyond, don’t finish it by stating “I’m hardworking.” Admissions officers are smart enough to figure that out on their own.

You should also avoid talking about how you hope to be accepted. Admissions officers know you want to be accepted—that’s why you applied! It’s okay to connect what you discuss in the essay to your potential future career or college experience, but don’t beg for admission. Stay focused on your essay’s core topic.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Many successful essays follow a “sandwich,” or full-circle, structure , meaning that they start with some image or idea, veer away from it in the middle, and then return to it at the end.

This structure is clean, self-contained, and satisfying for readers, so it’s a great choice if it works with the topic you’ve chosen.

In the “sandwich” essay outlined below, a student discusses his passion for musical theater. Instead of simply stating that interest, his essay starts with a funny anecdote about a minor fire that erupted on set. At the end, it returns to this anecdote, creating a sense of closure.

• Intro: I may be the world’s worst firefighter.
• Flashback to working on the school musical
• Demonstrate my passion for theatre
• Detail the story of the theater set catching fire
• Show how I made the most of the situation
• Conclusion: I proved my value as a director, an actor, and a writer that week一even if I was a terrible firefighter.

Many successful essays end by looking forward to the future. These endings are generally hopeful and positive—always great qualities in an admissions essay—and often connect the student to the college or their academic goals.

Although these endings can be highly effective, it can be challenging to keep them from sounding cliché. Keep your ending specific to you, and don’t default to generalities, which can make your essay seem bland and unoriginal.

Below are a good and a bad example of how you could write a “looking forward” ending for the musical theater “firefighter” essay.

Sometimes, holding back your main point can be a good strategy. If your essay recounts several experiences, you could save your main message for the conclusion, only explaining what ties all the stories together at the very end.

When done well, this ending leaves the reader thinking about the main point you want them to take from your essay. It’s also a memorable structure that can stand out.

However, if you choose this approach, it can be challenging to keep the essay interesting enough that the reader pays attention throughout.

In the essay outlined below, a student gives us snapshots of her experience of gymnastics at different stages in her life. In the conclusion, she ties the stories together and shares the insight that they taught her about different aspects of her character and values.

• Passionate, excited
• Sister born that day—began to consider people beyond myself
• Realizing that no matter how much I love gymnastics, there are more important things
• I’d been working especially hard to qualify for that level
• It came after many setbacks and failures
• I had to give up time with friends, first homecoming dance of high school, and other activities, and I considered quitting
• Conclusion: I’m still all of those selves: the passionate 7-year-old, the caring 11-year-old, and the determined 15-year-old. Gymnastics has been a constant throughout my life, but beyond the balance beam, it has also shown me how to change and grow.

Ending on an action can be a strong way to wrap up your essay. That might mean including a literal action, dialogue, or continuation of the story.

These endings leave the reader wanting more rather than wishing the essay had ended sooner. They’re interesting and can help you avoid boring your reader.

Here’s an example of how this ending could work for the gymnastics essay.

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Academic writing

• Writing process
• Transition words
• Passive voice
• Paraphrasing

 Communication

• How to end an email
• Ms, mrs, miss
• How to start an email
• I hope this email finds you well
• Hope you are doing well

 Parts of speech

• Personal pronouns
• Conjunctions

There are a few strategies you can use for a memorable ending to your college essay :

• Return to the beginning with a “full circle” structure
• Reveal the main point or insight in your story
• Look to the future
• End on an action

The best technique will depend on your topic choice, essay outline, and writing style. You can write several endings using different techniques to see which works best.

Unlike a five-paragraph essay, your admissions essay should not end by summarizing the points you’ve already made. It’s better to be creative and aim for a strong final impression.

You should also avoid stating the obvious (for example, saying that you hope to be accepted).

There are no set rules for how to structure a college application essay , but these are two common structures that work:

• A montage structure, a series of vignettes with a common theme.
• A narrative structure, a single story that shows your personal growth or how you overcame a challenge.

Avoid the five-paragraph essay structure that you learned in high school.

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding message, flow, tone, style , and clarity. Then, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Testa, M. (2023, May 31). How to End a College Admissions Essay | 4 Winning Strategies. Scribbr. Retrieved March 27, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/college-essay/conclusion-college-essay/

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How to End a College Essay – With Examples

June 16, 2023

Figuring out how to end a college essay can feel like the difference between success and failure. Common scenario: You’ve done the heavy lifting of brainstorming, developing, and revising your Common App essay, but now you sit and stare at the cursor pulsing on your screen, like a stress tick in your eye. What to say that you haven’t already said? How to tie it all together without sounding tired and stressed? It is true that your conclusion serves as a sort of benchmark for the strength of your overall essay. If your conclusion feels impossible to write after several attempts, this might be a sign that you need to go back and look over the strength or purpose of your essay overall.

The good news is, your final paragraph doesn’t need to be a graveyard of redundancy, clichés and tired summary! And even better, you have options about how to end a college essay. It doesn’t have to be formulaic or look like a friend’s conclusion. Amidst a dizzying array of “do’s and “don’ts,” here is a list of three straightforward options, along with examples, for how to successfully (and relatively painlessly) end your college essay.

Option 1: Save something for the end

It might be helpful to think of your essay like this: You are a tailor cutting a garment from a beautiful piece of fabric. You have plenty of fabric to work with because you are approaching your overall essay as a process: brainstorming, writing, revision, repeat. The writing process is cyclical. You begin with an idea, which leads you to another, and before you know it, you’re approaching your original idea from a different angle. In the midst of this process, you will unearth images, memories, meaningful moments, memorable things people in your life have said, and so on. When this happens, intentionally tuck away 1-2 of these items with the idea that you can use them to craft your final paragraph. Following are some examples of students who tried to save something for the end:

Strong Example:

Shortly before her death, my grandmother gave me a string of pearls. Whenever I look at these tiny treasures from the sea, I am reminded that despite our complex relationship, we made many meaningful memories together. Each pearl reminds me of an event, or place: Her 80th birthday party; deep sea diving in Florida; impromptu singing lessons around her piano. Along with the memories, the pearls are a symbol of her finest qualities—qualities she passed on to me: tenacity, loyalty, belief in the deep goodness of humanity—and a touchable reminder that I am in part who I am because of her.

This is a strong example  because the student chose a concrete image—an image that we can imagine seeing or touching—and uses it to deepen his reflection on his relationship with his grandmother. Images are memorable, so this reflection will echo longer in the reader’s mind; this is a classic example of showing AND telling.

How to End a College Essay (Continued)

Weak example:.

Travel is a great way to learn about the world and ourselves. My family would go on amazing trips together, and thinking back on those trips is a really good reminder of all the special memories I have made with them. One time we went to Columbia as a family, and it was very special to me. I tried so many different foods and met so many new people. I even got to use some of the Spanish I learned in school on this trip.  This trip really increased my passion for traveling. Having the opportunity to learn in a different setting while getting to experience new cultures is something I am really looking forward to during college.

This is a weak example  because it does feel as if the student ran out of gas at the end. Notice the use of general adjectives such as amazing and special , and the fact that while a specific place is mentioned—Columbia—nothing specific is said about the country, or the family’s experience there. What foods did the student try? What, besides getting to speak Spanish, made the trip special? There are golden opportunities in this example for where the writer could have invoked one of the five senses—taste, touch, smell, site, or sound—and did not.

Option 2: Leave the reader with a thought to keep the conversation going

You can choose to end your college essay by saying something about your story or topic that you did not feel you had the opportunity to say before.  Sometimes, at the end of an essay on a difficult or complex subject, you feel unable to just “wrap things up” like a pretty Christmas present. Is something still ambiguous for you? Does something still haunt you? Did you hold something back? Tell the reader about it. If it helps, imagine that you are having a conversation with a broader audience than an admissions counselor. If it helps, imagine that your audience is a friend, teacher, or family member.

The ideology behind color blindness doesn’t make you progressive, it makes you a coward. Talking about race should not be controversial. I shouldn’t be petrified to talk about racism to a group of white people . Petrified because I’ll most likely be shut down condescendingly like a parent scolding their child. I shouldn’t worry over the natural curls of my hair because it will seem ghetto and unprofessional.

Nor should I get excited when I see a movie that has at least one black person in a somewhat lead role. I should not have to read white literature, learn white history, and speak white English , but spend only one week learning about slavery. I shouldn’t have to read articles calling Edris Elba “too street” to play James Bond and Viola Davis “less classically beautiful.” So, why is it so hard to talk about racism? What about it make your spine tingle and the hairs on your skin raise?

This is a strong example because, wow! There is a lot of passion and specificity in this student’s reflection on race and racism. From her own curls, to literature and pop culture, this writer is not only giving her audience a piece of her mind, she is putting the ball in the reader’s court with that final question.

Also, think of it like this: What if this writer has hit upon the heart of her paper in her conclusion? What if, by “getting it all out,” she found a way to strengthen her thesis, and her overall purpose for her essay? In the lovely book on creative nonfiction called Tell it Slant , one writer describes the writing process this way: “The essayist attempts to surround a something—a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation, by coming at it from at all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter.” Trust your writing process, even if feels like you keep circling back to your starting point.

Speaking up for others is important. For example, after the death of George Floyd, Americans showed their support by protesting. Professional athletes have showed their support for the Black community by taking a knee during the national anthem, and regular people spread of awareness on social media. These are all crucial steps to the end of racial injustice in America. I learned that using your voice can make enormous impacts. In the future I’d really like to show my support in protests, by taking part in them, for these injustices.

This is a weak example because while it does mention several specifics, such as protests after the death of George Floyd, and professional athletes “taking the knee,” there isn’t enough of a connection between these examples and the writer. The details in this paragraph could really have been written by anyone (and those are the kind of conclusions you want to avoid writing at all costs!). In the sentence, for example, where the writer says, “I learned that using your voice can make enormous impacts,” s/he misses the opportunity to personalize this learning experience. Even if s/he did not have the opportunity to protest, etc., s/he could have delved deeper into his/her reactions and emotions to the events mentioned, or event discussed what they wished they’d have done to speak up.

Option 3: Don’t try to be fancy

Are you the kind of person who prefers facts and figures over emotions and descriptions? Do you dislike talking about yourself? Do you prefer taking apart machines to playing Wordle? Then this option is for you. When ending your college essay, being clear is better than being fancy. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to write well. It just means that you can choose to focus more on being straightforward—describing a process, ending with a clear purpose for the future—than being colorful or edgy. The most important thing about the whole college essay writing process, after all, is about showing your authenticity.

It took time and patience, but by observing how various students worked and how I could best help them, I became an effective and efficient Homework Coach. Because I volunteered longer than anyone else, I became the lead Homework Coach. I passed on my hard-won knowledge about developing teaching strategies to the tutors in training so they too could be successful in teaching a variety of subjects. I enjoyed my time helping others and even received a community service award from the President of the United States. Going forward, I plan to continue using my skills as a tutor to help friends and classmates with their homework.

This is a strong example because the student clearly describes a learning experience, what he took from it, and what he hopes to do with it in the future. The writer is obviously proud of his accomplishments, but does not feel the need to “dress them up” by using fancy vocabulary, clichés or empty adjectives.

Which brings me to this point: You don’t need be the daughter of a professional clown, or have ridden an alpaca ten miles to school in order to have something worthwhile to say. Hard work speaks for itself, and often, being authentically you starts with acknowledging day-to-day life lessons and everyday accomplishments.

Weak Example

I started working as a lifeguard at my community pool as a skinny 16-year-old. I remember my first day like it was yesterday. It was 90 degrees, and my red Nike one-piece felt like a melting popsicle as I watched others having fun and cooling off in the water. I remember that there was a mom there with a set of twin toddlers, and I nervously kept an eye on them. Being a lifeguard is all about responsibility and teamwork. My lifeguard team has an outstanding record of keeping swimmers safe. As a student majoring in business, I know that having teamwork skills will be very important, especially because I will probably have to work with a team when I begin my career as well.

This is a weak example because the writer strays from her focus of being a lifeguard, and what she learned about responsibility and teamwork. The reflective, narrative details about the heat, the swimsuit, and the mom with twins, not to mention the cliché “I remember…like it was yesterday,” detract from her overall purpose. Don’t get me wrong: using narrative details to talk about life lessons is not a wrong approach; however, focus first on clarity and your overall purpose for writing.

How to End a College Essay – Final Thoughts

Remember, when ending your college essay, you have options! Consider trying each of these 3 approaches and see which you like best. And as you think about and brainstorm your essays, check out these links, too:

• How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example ;
• 2023-2024 Common App Essay Prompts
• Why this College Essay—7 Tips for Success
• College Essay

Charity Gingerich

With a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing, Charity has served as an English and creative writing lecturer at several universities. Charity has received many awards for her work, including the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award,  Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry, and The Hopper Poetry Prize. Her writing has been featured in FIELD, The Kenyon Review, and Indiana Review, among others.

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How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay: 10 Examples of Conclusion Paragraphs

How to write a conclusion for an essay? When it comes to writing an essay, the conclusion is often overlooked as just a summary of the main points. However, a strong conclusion can leave a lasting impression on the reader and tie together all the ideas presented in the essay. In this article, we will explore different strategies for writing an effective conclusion and provide some examples to help you get started.

How To Write a Conclusion for an Essay

Understanding the Purpose of a Conclusion

A conclusion is an essential part of any essay, and it serves a crucial role in summarizing your arguments and providing closure to your readers. In this section, we will discuss the role and importance of a conclusion in an essay.

Role of a Conclusion

The primary role of a conclusion is to bring closure to your essay by summarizing your arguments and restating your thesis statement. It is the final opportunity to leave a lasting impression on your readers and persuade them to take action or think differently about the topic.

Additionally, a conclusion can also provide a sense of completion to your essay by tying up any loose ends and addressing any counterarguments or opposing viewpoints. It should leave your readers with a clear understanding of your position and the significance of your arguments.

Importance of a Strong Conclusion

A strong conclusion can make a significant impact on the overall effectiveness of your essay. It can leave a lasting impression on your readers and persuade them to take action or think differently about the topic.

A weak or poorly written conclusion, on the other hand, can undermine the credibility of your arguments and leave your readers with a sense of confusion or dissatisfaction. It can also fail to provide closure to your essay and leave your readers with unanswered questions or unresolved issues.

To ensure that your conclusion is strong and effective, you should consider the following tips:

• Restate your thesis statement in a new and compelling way.
• Summarize your main arguments and provide a clear and concise summary of your essay.
• Address any counterarguments or opposing viewpoints and explain why your position is the most valid.
• Provide a call to action or suggest further research or exploration on the topic.

In conclusion, a conclusion is an essential part of any essay, and it serves a crucial role in summarizing your arguments and providing closure to your readers. A strong conclusion can leave a lasting impression on your readers and persuade them to take action or think differently about the topic. By following the tips provided in this section, you can ensure that your conclusion is strong and effective.

How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay

Restating the thesis.

One of the most important elements of your conclusion is restating your thesis. This means that you should rephrase your thesis statement in a way that reminds the reader of the main point of your essay. By doing so, you can help ensure that your reader leaves with a clear understanding of your argument.

Summarizing Main Points

In addition to restating your thesis, it can be helpful to summarize the main points of your essay. This can help tie together any loose ends and ensure that your reader understands the full scope of your argument. When summarizing your main points, be sure to be concise and avoid repeating information that you have already covered.

Closing Statement

Finally, you should include a closing statement in your conclusion. This should be a sentence or two that leaves a lasting impression on your reader. You may want to consider ending with a thought-provoking question, a call to action, or a memorable quote. Whatever you choose, make sure that it is relevant to your essay and leaves a lasting impression.

Writing Techniques for Effective Conclusions

Using a quote.

One way to add impact to your conclusion is to use a relevant quote. This can be a quote from a famous person, a line from a poem or song, or even a quote from one of the sources you’ve used in your essay. The key is to choose a quote that adds depth and meaning to your conclusion.

For example, if you’re writing an essay about the importance of education, you might conclude with a quote from Nelson Mandela : “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” This quote not only reinforces the importance of education but also adds a powerful emotional element to your conclusion.

Posing a Question

Another effective technique for writing a conclusion is to pose a thought-provoking question. This can be a rhetorical question or a question that requires further exploration. The goal is to leave your reader thinking about the topic long after they’ve finished reading your essay.

For example, if you’re writing an essay about climate change, you might conclude with a question like: “What kind of world do we want to leave for future generations?” This question encourages your reader to consider the long-term implications of climate change and can leave a lasting impact.

Making a Prediction

Finally, you can use your conclusion to make a prediction about the future. This can be a prediction about the topic you’ve been discussing or a prediction about the impact your essay will have on the reader. The goal is to leave your reader with a sense of hope or inspiration.

For example, if you’re writing an essay about the importance of volunteer work, you might conclude with a prediction like: “As more people become involved in volunteer work, we can look forward to a brighter, more compassionate future.” This prediction not only reinforces the importance of volunteer work but also leaves the reader feeling inspired to make a difference.

Conclusion Paragraph Examples

Example from a literary essay.

In a literary essay, your conclusion should tie together the various themes and motifs that you’ve explored throughout your essay. Here’s an example of a strong conclusion from a literary essay:

“Overall, the use of symbolism in ‘The Great Gatsby’ highlights the stark contrast between the facade of the American Dream and the harsh reality of life in the 1920s. Through the use of the green light, the valley of ashes, and the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, Fitzgerald demonstrates the emptiness and corruption that lies at the heart of the American Dream. By exposing the hollowness of this ideal, Fitzgerald challenges us to consider what truly gives our lives meaning.”

Example from a Research Paper

In a research paper, your conclusion should summarize your findings and explain the implications of your research. Here’s an example of a strong conclusion from a research paper:

“In conclusion, our study provides evidence that regular exercise can have a significant impact on reducing the risk of heart disease. Our findings suggest that individuals who engage in regular physical activity are more likely to maintain healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as reduce their risk of developing other chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. These findings have important implications for public health policy and highlight the need for increased efforts to promote physical activity.”

Example from an Argumentative Essay

In an argumentative essay, your conclusion should summarize your main argument and leave your reader with a clear understanding of your position. Here’s an example of a strong conclusion from an argumentative essay:

“Based on the evidence presented, it is clear that the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports is both unethical and dangerous. While some argue that these drugs are necessary to remain competitive in today’s sports landscape, the risks associated with their use far outweigh any potential benefits. It is up to us as a society to take a stand against this practice and demand that our athletes compete on a level playing field, free from the influence of performance-enhancing drugs.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some effective ways to end a conclusion?

One effective way to end a conclusion is to restate the thesis statement in a different way. You can also summarize the main points of your essay and leave the reader with a final thought or a call to action.

How can I write a strong conclusion for a research paper?

To write a strong conclusion for a research paper, you should briefly summarize the main points of the paper and restate the thesis statement. You can also suggest avenues for further research or provide a final thought that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

What are some words or phrases that can be used to conclude an essay?

Some words and phrases that can be used to conclude an essay include “in conclusion,” “to sum up,” “therefore,” “thus,” “finally,” and “in summary.” However, it’s important to use these words and phrases appropriately and not overuse them.

Can you provide some examples of a conclusion paragraph for a project?

Sure, here’s an example of a conclusion paragraph for a project:

“In conclusion, this project has shown that renewable energy is a viable alternative to fossil fuels. By harnessing the power of wind, solar, and hydroelectricity, we can reduce our dependence on non-renewable resources and mitigate the effects of climate change. While there are still challenges to be overcome, such as cost and infrastructure, the potential benefits of renewable energy make it a promising option for the future.”

How do you write a conclusion for an argumentative essay?

To write a conclusion for an argumentative essay, you should summarize the main points of your argument and restate your thesis statement. You can also provide a final thought or call to action that encourages the reader to take a particular course of action or consider a different perspective.

What is the purpose of a conclusion paragraph in an essay?

The purpose of a conclusion paragraph in an essay is to provide a sense of closure and completeness to the reader. It should summarize the main points of the essay and restate the thesis statement in a different way. Additionally, it can leave the reader with a final thought or a call to action.

Last Updated on August 28, 2023

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How to Write a Conclusion for an Essay: 101 Guide & Examples

The conclusion is the last paragraph in your paper that draws the ideas and reasoning together. However, its purpose does not end there. A definite essay conclusion accomplishes several goals:

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• It provides a summary of the arguments;
• It addresses other important questions regarding the topic;
• It makes the reader think about the essay;
• It speculates what will happen in the future.

Therefore, a conclusion usually consists of :

• A restated thesis;
• A brief summary of subpoints;
• A sentence that produces the final impression.

Our experts prepared this guide, where you will find great tips on how to conclude your essay. If you incorporate them into your work, you will be able to write an outstanding essay ending.

🚧 Connect to the Body

⛏️ restate the thesis, 🧱 summarize.

• ⛔ What to Avoid

💯 Conclusion Examples

🏗️ 101 guide on writing a conclusion.

Writing a concluding paragraph is, in a way, similar to writing an introduction . An introduction tells the readers what you are about to say. Meanwhile, a conclusion retells what you said in the essay.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of differences, as well. The conclusion is not about introducing new ideas but restating them. The structure below will help you if you are wondering how to write an excellent conclusion for the essay.

Keep in mind:

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When writing a concluding paragraph, you should go from specific information to a general one. Thus, you’ll write it, mirroring the introduction to the paper, which starts with the overall context and ends with a thesis.

You should adequately introduce a conclusion and connect it to the body paragraphs. For that, you can either come up with a transition word or a transition statement .

Make sure to search for something more creative than “to sum up” or “finally.” There are hundreds of ways to conclude an essay. For that, you can search for transition words that look fresh and not overused.

A list of original transitions:

• All things considered
• As a result
• As I stated in the beginning
• Consequently
• Subsequently
• This leads back to
• Without a doubt

The next step is to restate the thesis from your introduction. However, you shouldn’t repeat it word to word. Try to find a new effective way to express the same idea and develop it further.

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The evidence presented in this paper has shown that the controversy on whether a strict dress-code policy is beneficial for schools is yet to be resolved.

Also, the example shows how to start a conclusion. The author makes a transition from the body paragraph by reminding what controversy the essay tried to address.

Instead of repeating your essay point by point, you should give a summary and synthesize the arguments. The conclusory paragraph’s goal is to wrap up the essay and answer a “so what?”. Combining the ideas into a coherent paragraph will do the trick. To help yourself out with this task, try using a main idea generator and use the results as an inspiration for your own summary.

You should aim to show that there is a link between all the points you have made throughout the essay. Let your reader know that you have connected the dots.

In the meantime, one must admit that such outfits are uncomfortable, and the school uniform policy indeed damages students’ self-perception. Even though teenagers who wear uniforms get used to the working environment and improve grades, they lack freedom of individual expression.

Here, the author summarizes all the points by demonstrating the problems of wearing a school uniform. It prepares the reader for the final part of the conclusion—a conclusion statement.

👷 Conclude with a Statement

It is the last part of the essay, and one might claim that it’s the most crucial one. It is your last chance to convince your readers. Besides, an outstanding concluding statement creates a sense of completeness.

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You can do it in three ways:

• Connect the statement to the hook. It will create a definite closure in the entire essay as the end will be linked to the beginning. Logical reasoning is exceptionally significant. By coming up with a proper conclusion sentence, you can demonstrate it.
• Make it short and straightforward. You said everything you wanted in the body, and now it’s the time to create a final effect. Uncomplicated and short sentences can help you produce it.
• Create a compound statement or parallel in structure . Such sentences have a sense of balance and look beautiful on the page.

Therefore, school authorities should consider seeking other ways to deal with problems of discipline and inequality on their grounds, rather than implementing only cosmetic changes, which harms students’ originality.

⛔ What to Avoid in a Conclusion

Here are a few tips on ways to conclude an essay by making it more appealing to the reader:

• Do not introduce new ideas. The concluding paragraph should be concise and straightforward. You already had enough time to explain your position and provide evidence for the readers to understand it.
• Do not try to fit everything in your conclusion. If you think the point is essential, then you should include it. Otherwise, cut it off.
• Do not repeat your thesis statement. It is more than paraphrasing or summarizing it—develop it according to the body.
• Do not use too many words. You have to remember about space, as your conclusion should be around 10% of the essay.
• Do not provide your personal opinion out of the blue. If it’s not based on your argumentation and evidence, keep it to yourself.

If you are still wondering: “How do you conclude an essay?” this article can help you learn some essential tips. The sample essay’s conclusion is summarizing and synthesizing the principal points of the piece. It restates the thesis statement and emphasizes the general significance of the topic. You can also try and use a sentence summarizer on your own text to check out a wider variety of examples.

The evidence presented in this paper has shown that the controversy on whether a strict dress-code policy is beneficial for schools is yet to be resolved. In the meantime, one must admit that such outfits are uncomfortable, and the school uniform policy indeed damages students’ self-perception. Even though teenagers who wear uniforms get used to the working environment and improve grades, they lack freedom of individual expression. Therefore, school authorities should consider seeking other ways to deal with problems of discipline and inequality on their grounds, rather than implementing only cosmetic changes, which harms students’ originality.

Thank you for reading this article, and don’t hesitate to share it with your peers. If you want to improve your essay-writing skills, look at the materials provided on our website. We have plenty of tips on how to write better essays !

• Ending the Essay—Conclusions: Pat Bellanca, for the Writing Center at Harvard University
• The Conclusion of the Essay: University of Wollongong
• Conclusions: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Transitional Words and Phrases: The Writing Center, University of Wisconsin-Wadison
• Essay Conclusion: OWLL, Massey University, University of New Zealand
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Some experts argue that focusing on individual actions to combat climate change takes the focus away from the collective action required to keep carbon levels from rising. Change will not be effected, say some others, unless individual actions raise the necessary awareness.

While a reader can see the connection between the sentences above, it’s not immediately clear that the second sentence is providing a counterargument to the first. In the example below, key “old information” is repeated in the second sentence to help readers quickly see the connection. This makes the sequence of ideas easier to follow.  

Sentence pair #2: Effective Transition

Some experts argue that focusing on individual actions to combat climate change takes the focus away from the collective action required to keep carbon levels from rising. Other experts argue that individual actions are key to raising the awareness necessary to effect change.

You can use this same technique to create clear transitions between paragraphs. Here’s an example:

Some experts argue that focusing on individual actions to combat climate change takes the focus away from the collective action required to keep carbon levels from rising. Other experts argue that individual actions are key to raising the awareness necessary to effect change. According to Annie Lowery, individual actions are important to making social change because when individuals take action, they can change values, which can lead to more people becoming invested in fighting climate change. She writes, “Researchers believe that these kinds of household-led trends can help avert climate catastrophe, even if government and corporate actions are far more important” (Lowery).

So, what’s an individual household supposed to do?

The repetition of the word “household” in the new paragraph helps readers see the connection between what has come before (a discussion of whether household actions matter) and what is about to come (a proposal for what types of actions households can take to combat climate change).

Sometimes, transitional words can help readers see how ideas are connected. But it’s not enough to just include a “therefore,” “moreover,” “also,” or “in addition.” You should choose these words carefully to show your readers what kind of connection you are making between your ideas.

To decide which transitional word to use, start by identifying the relationship between your ideas. For example, you might be

• making a comparison or showing a contrast Transitional words that compare and contrast include also, in the same way, similarly, in contrast, yet, on the one hand, on the other hand. But before you signal comparison, ask these questions: Do your readers need another example of the same thing? Is there a new nuance in this next point that distinguishes it from the previous example? For those relationships between ideas, you might try this type of transition: While x may appear the same, it actually raises a new question in a slightly different way. 
• expressing agreement or disagreement When you are making an argument, you need to signal to readers where you stand in relation to other scholars and critics. You may agree with another person’s claim, you may want to concede some part of the argument even if you don’t agree with everything, or you may disagree. Transitional words that signal agreement, concession, and disagreement include however, nevertheless, actually, still, despite, admittedly, still, on the contrary, nonetheless .
• showing cause and effect Transitional phrases that show cause and effect include therefore, hence, consequently, thus, so. Before you choose one of these words, make sure that what you are about to illustrate is really a causal link. Novice writers tend to add therefore and hence when they aren’t sure how to transition; you should reserve these words for when they accurately signal the progression of your ideas.
• explaining or elaborating Transitions can signal to readers that you are going to expand on a point that you have just made or explain something further. Transitional words that signal explanation or elaboration include in other words, for example, for instance, in particular, that is, to illustrate, moreover .
• drawing conclusions You can use transitions to signal to readers that you are moving from the body of your argument to your conclusions. Before you use transitional words to signal conclusions, consider whether you can write a stronger conclusion by creating a transition that shows the relationship between your ideas rather than by flagging the paragraph simply as a conclusion. Transitional words that signal a conclusion include in conclusion , as a result, ultimately, overall— but strong conclusions do not necessarily have to include those phrases.

If you’re not sure which transitional words to use—or whether to use one at all—see if you can explain the connection between your paragraphs or sentence either out loud or in the margins of your draft.

For example, if you write a paragraph in which you summarize physician Atul Gawande’s argument about the value of incremental care, and then you move on to a paragraph that challenges those ideas, you might write down something like this next to the first paragraph: “In this paragraph I summarize Gawande’s main claim.” Then, next to the second paragraph, you might write, “In this paragraph I present a challenge to Gawande’s main claim.” Now that you have identified the relationship between those two paragraphs, you can choose the most effective transition between them. Since the second paragraph in this example challenges the ideas in the first, you might begin with something like “but,” or “however,” to signal that shift for your readers.  

• picture_as_pdf Transitions

35 Transition Words for Conclusions

When transitioning to conclusions, we can simply use the term “In conclusion”, but over time, this word starts to feel tedious and repetitive. There are better ways to do it.

Transition words help your essays flow more easily and act as signposts for your reader so they know when you’re moving from one part of an essay to another.

So, for your next essay conclusion , consider the following transition words which can help you to improve your vocabulary and academic writing skills .

I’ve saved five bonus transition words for the very end which are my personal favorites. These are for advanced students who really want to demonstrate an academic tone – don’t miss them! They’re at the very end.

Transition Words for Conclusions

1. in conclusion.

This phrase is typically used to signal the final remarks in a piece of writing. It helps summarize the main points or findings that have been discussed throughout the text. It is still generally appropriate to use, but can sometimes appear rudimentary use of the English language.

Sample Sentences:

“ In conclusion , implementing green technology in our daily lives can significantly reduce carbon footprints.”

“The research findings were quite revealing. In conclusion , more emphasis should be put on early childhood education.”

2. To sum up

This is often used to encapsulate the main points of a discussion or argument in a succinct way. It is used almost as frequently as ‘in conclusion’.

“ To sum up , a balanced diet and regular exercise are crucial for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.”

“The evidence points towards the need for more environmental protections. To sum up , without immediate action, our natural resources may become irreversibly damaged.”

3. In summary

Similar to “to sum up”, this phrase is used to provide a brief overview of the main points or findings discussed in the writing.

“ In summary , the research suggests a strong correlation between air pollution and respiratory diseases.”

“ In summary , the novel is a fascinating exploration of human resilience in the face of adversity.”

4. All in all

This phrase is used to express a final general statement or judgment considering everything that has been said. It is somewhat more colloquial than the three phrases above, making it potentially less valuable for an essay. However, in reflective pieces, it may be used. See the reflective examples below.

“ All in all , the team performed well despite the challenging circumstances.”

“ All in all , the benefits of recycling outweigh any potential disadvantages.”

5. Ultimately

This word is used to indicate the final result or fundamental reason after considering everything.

“ Ultimately , the success of the project depends on the dedication of the team members.”

“Despite initial hurdles, the venture was successful. Ultimately , perseverance and commitment were key to our success.”

6. Therefore

This word is used to introduce a logical conclusion from the evidence or reasons previously stated. It is used best to conclude a paragraph of sub-section than as the final essay conclusion.

“The cost of production has significantly decreased. Therefore , we can expect an increase in profit margins.”

“He didn’t meet the eligibility criteria. Therefore , his application was rejected.”

This is similar to “therefore” and is used to introduce a conclusion, a result or an implication. As with ‘therefore’, ‘It ‘hence’ is used best to conclude a paragraph of sub-section than as the final essay conclusion.

“He was late for his interview. Hence , he didn’t make a good impression.”

“The data was incomplete. Hence , the results of the study may not be entirely accurate.”

8. Consequently

This word is used to express a result or effect of a previous statement. It is best used mid-paragraph or in the middle of a sub-section, not an overall conclusion.

“There was heavy rainfall throughout the night. Consequently , the match was postponed.”

“The company didn’t adapt to the changing market trends. Consequently , they faced heavy losses.”

This is used to denote the conclusion or summary of something previously stated. It indicates that what follows is a result or inference from what has been stated before. It is best used mid-paragraph or in the middle of a sub-section, not an overall conclusion. While I quite like this term, some teachers see it as a bit old-timey.

“She didn’t study hard. Thus , she failed the exam.”

“The evidence is clearly inadmissible. Thus , the case should be dismissed.”

10. This essay’s final analysis is…

This phrase is used to introduce the ultimate conclusion that has been reached after consideration of all the facts.

“ This essay’s final analysis is that it is the lowest earners in society who have been hit hardest by this economic downturn.”

“ This essay’s final analysis is that it’s clear that the policy has had a positive impact on the community.”

11. On the whole

This phrase is often used when you want to make a general summary statement about a larger body of information or arguments. It implies that the statement accounts for all the details and complexities discussed previously. Generally, this is more colloquial so should only be used in less formal essay styles.

“On the whole” can help to simplify complex arguments, and it can signal that the writer has given due consideration to different perspectives or evidence before arriving at their conclusion.

“ On the whole , the company’s strategy has been effective, leading to an increase in profits and customer satisfaction.”

“Despite some negative feedback, on the whole , the policy has received wide public approval.”

12. To conclude

Similar to “In conclusion,” this phrase is a clear signal that the writer is about to wrap up their argument or findings.

“To conclude” can provide a sense of closure for the reader and it reaffirms the significance of the arguments or findings that have been presented.

“ To conclude , the study revealed that regular exercise can significantly reduce stress levels.”

“ To conclude , it is evident from the data that our marketing strategies have significantly boosted sales.”

13. To recap

This phrase is used when the writer wants to summarize the key points of their argument or discussion.

“To recap” can help to reinforce the importance of these points for the reader and it also serves as a quick reference or summary.

“ To recap , our findings suggest that the new drug can effectively alleviate symptoms in 80% of patients.”

“ To recap , our team achieved all project milestones on time and under budget.”

14. In essence

This phrase is often used when the writer wants to encapsulate the fundamental nature or core idea of their argument or discussion.

“In essence” can help to distill complex ideas or arguments down to their most basic and important elements.

“ In essence , the concept of freedom is at the heart of democratic societies.”

“ In essence , our project aims to develop sustainable solutions for waste management.”

15. In retrospect

This phrase is typically used when the writer wants to look back on a situation, decision, or period of time and make a summary statement or conclusion about it. Use it in reflective essays.

“In retrospect” can be useful for conveying a sense of learned wisdom or insight gained after the fact. It often suggests that the writer’s perspective has evolved or deepened over time.

“ In retrospect , investing in renewable energy technologies was a wise business decision.”

“ In retrospect , we could have implemented additional measures to ensure the safety of our staff during the pandemic.”

16. Overall

This is commonly used to indicate a consideration of all factors or an assessment of the situation in its entirety.

“Overall” is often used to summarize complex scenarios involving multiple elements. It represents a comprehensive viewpoint that takes into account all the variables discussed.

“ Overall , our company’s performance this year has been exceptional, with growth in nearly all sectors.”

“While the program faced some obstacles initially, overall , it has been successful in achieving its main objectives.”

17. Finally

This word is often used to indicate the last point or idea in a list or sequence.

“Finally” is a transition word that suggests the end of a discussion. It can also indicate the final and often most important point in an argument or discussion.

“ Finally , the most compelling evidence for climate change is the consistent rise in global temperatures over the past century.”

“ Finally , it’s worth mentioning the commitment and dedication of our team, which played a significant role in the project’s success.”

18. Accordingly

This word is used to express the idea that something is a logical result of something else.

“Accordingly” signifies that the statement that follows is based on what was previously mentioned. It reflects a cause-effect relationship between two points or arguments.

“We have noticed a significant increase in demand for our product. Accordingly , we have decided to increase our production capacity.”

“The weather forecast predicts heavy snowfall. Accordingly , we have postponed the event.”

19. As a result

Similar to “accordingly”, this phrase is used to indicate that something is a consequence of a previous action or situation.

“As a result” introduces the outcome of a given circumstance or set of circumstances, signifying a cause-effect relationship.

“Our competitors have lowered their prices. As a result , we have also decided to adjust our pricing strategy.”

“The new policies were not well received. As a result , the company faced significant backlash from the public.”

20. In short

This phrase is used when you want to summarize a complex idea, argument, or discussion in a concise way.

“In short” helps to condense complex or lengthy explanations into a simpler and shorter summary. It indicates a concise conclusion.

“ In short , the environmental benefits of renewable energy make it a vital component of our fight against climate change.”

“ In short , the project was a success, meeting all its goals and objectives within the allocated time and budget.”

21. In brief

This phrase is used to provide a concise summary of information or to draw a quick conclusion.

“In brief” helps to distill longer discussions or complex arguments into their most critical points. It aims to convey the gist of the matter succinctly.

“ In brief , adopting sustainable practices is not just beneficial for the environment, but it also makes economic sense.”

“ In brief , our research findings confirm the hypothesis that regular exercise can improve mental health.”

22. To summarize

This phrase helps encapsulate the key points discussed in the conversation or writing.

“To summarize” allows the writer to highlight the most important points or findings, reaffirming them for the reader. It reinforces the primary arguments or conclusions.

“ To summarize , we believe investing in renewable energy is a strategic decision that will yield long-term benefits.”

“ To summarize , the data clearly shows an upward trend in consumer demand for eco-friendly products.”

This word is often used to introduce a conclusion or a result based on the previous discussion.

“So” is a simple and effective way to link cause and effect, or problem and solution. It leads the reader directly to the outcome or conclusion.

“The experiment failed to produce the expected results, so we’ll need to revise our approach.”

“Our marketing campaign has been highly successful, so we plan to increase our advertising budget.”

24. Clearly

This word is often used to express that something is obvious or noticeable, especially after analyzing the data or arguments presented.

“Clearly” can emphasize the strength of the evidence or arguments, and it signals confidence in the conclusion.

“ Clearly , our efforts to improve customer service have resulted in higher client satisfaction rates.”

“After reviewing the data, it’s clearly evident that our sales have significantly increased since launching the new product line.”

25. After all

This phrase can be used to emphasize a decisive argument or fact that should be considered.

“After all” often introduces a compelling reason or justification that supports the conclusion. It can help stress the importance of the points previously mentioned.

“We should move forward with the merger, after all , it presents a unique opportunity to expand our market reach.”

“The committee decided to fund the project, after all , it aligns with our goals and has significant potential.”

26. As mentioned earlier

This phrase refers back to something that was stated previously in the conversation or text.

“As mentioned earlier” can be used to re-emphasize an important point or piece of evidence that supports the conclusion. It can reinforce the argument by reminding the reader of what has been discussed previously.

One downside of this is it seems redundant – why are you repeating what you said earlier rather than doing what a conclusion should do: summarizing and synthesizing your points.

“ As mentioned earlier , the correlation between the variables is strong, indicating a significant relationship.”

“ As mentioned earlier , our success is largely due to our dedicated and talented team.”

27. As has been noted

This phrase is often used to restate something important that has been pointed out in the discussion.

“As has been noted” functions similarly to “as mentioned earlier,” serving to underscore a significant point or detail previously discussed. It strengthens the conclusion by referencing crucial information.

As with the phrase “as mentioned earlier”, this one may come across as a redundant phrase and could even signal that you’re repeating yourself rather than adding value through an evaluation or revision exercise.

“ As has been noted , the high turnover rate in the company is a significant concern that requires immediate attention.”

“ As has been noted , the initiative has resulted in substantial benefits for our community.”

28. As has been shown

This phrase is used to reference evidence or arguments that have been presented earlier.

“As has been shown” emphasizes the proof or reasoning that led to the conclusion. It reaffirms the legitimacy of the conclusion based on the presented evidence.

This can also come across as redundant, though.

“ As has been shown , our new marketing strategies have significantly boosted our brand visibility.”

“ As has been shown , the new policy has had a substantial positive impact on our employees’ work-life balance.”

29. As we have seen

Similar to the above, this phrase refers to the evidence or arguments discussed earlier in the text.

“As we have seen” serves to revisit important details or arguments that have been presented. It strengthens the conclusion by directly linking it to the evidence discussed.

“ As we have seen , the implementation of stricter environmental regulations has led to significant improvements in air quality.”

“ As we have seen , investing in staff training and development leads to increased productivity and employee satisfaction.”

30. Given the above points

This phrase is used to draw a conclusion from the arguments or points that have been presented.

“Given these points” signals that the following statement is based on the information discussed earlier. It helps establish a logical connection between the conclusion and the supporting points.

“ Given the above points , it’s clear that we must take immediate action to address the climate crisis.”

“ Given the above points , our company should continue to prioritize customer service as a key aspect of our business strategy.”

31. By and large

This phrase is often used to indicate a general conclusion, considering all the information.

“By and large” is used to sum up general trends or themes that have been discussed. It signals that the conclusion takes into account all the points made, rather than focusing on one particular point.

However, it can come across as a bit informal.

“ By and large , our team’s performance this quarter has exceeded expectations.”

“ By and large , customer feedback about our new product line has been positive.”

32. For the most part

Similar to “by and large”, this phrase indicates that the conclusion drawn applies broadly but allows for exceptions.

“For the most part” suggests a nuanced conclusion that covers the majority of situations or cases but acknowledges that there may be exceptions. It indicates a balanced and fair summary.

This one’s formality level is also quite low

“ For the most part , the new legislation has been successful, though there are a few areas that require further refinement.”

“ For the most part , our employees have embraced the new remote working arrangements, though a small number have experienced challenges.”

33. As has been demonstrated

This phrase refers to the evidence or arguments presented in the body of the text that support the conclusion.

“As has been demonstrated” underscores the points or evidence that have been made and connects them directly to the conclusion. It is a way of affirming the strength of the presented arguments or evidence.

“ As has been demonstrated , the innovative design features of our product set us apart from the competition.”

“ As has been demonstrated , implementing green initiatives in our operations has both environmental and economic benefits.”

34. With this in mind

This phrase suggests that the conclusion follows logically from the information or arguments that have been presented.

“With this in mind” sets up the conclusion as a direct response or reaction to the evidence or points made. It indicates that the conclusion is informed by these considerations.

“ With this in mind , we propose an expansion of our research and development department to drive future innovation.”

“ With this in mind , it’s crucial that we continue our efforts to reduce carbon emissions and promote sustainable practices.”

35. Taking everything into account

This phrase is used to express a comprehensive conclusion that considers all the arguments, evidence, or factors presented.

“Taking everything into account” shows a thorough and thoughtful conclusion that takes into account all aspects of the discussion. It signifies a balanced and careful consideration of all the relevant information.

“ Taking everything into account , we recommend a strategic pivot towards digital marketing in order to reach a broader audience.”

“ Taking everything into account , our analysis suggests that investing in renewable energy sources would be beneficial for our long-term growth.”

Advanced Transition Phrases for Conclusions

The following are five phrases I personally use in my own academic conclusions, especially for argumentative essays. They’re for advanced students aiming to show depth of knowledge!

36. Based on the available evidence

This phrase is demonstrating that you’re about to sum up the essay’s key arguments. You are saying that you’re making an evaluation after examining all of the evidence and research on the topic. It helps to show your argument is based on evidence , which is good to show in an academic paper.

“ Based on the available evidence , it appears that the best path forward for addressing AI in the workplace is to allow it but regulate it to prevent unwanted negative externalities such as job losses.”

“ Based on the available evidence , teachers should be paid more than they currently are, given that they contribute significantly to social and economic development of societies.”

37. According to the key literature outlined in this paper

Similar to the above example, this one demonstrates that your final decision and thesis statement in your argumentative essay is based on real evidence and research, not just your opinion. So, you could begin your conclusion like this!

“ According to the key literature outlined in this paper , it appears that the best path forward for addressing AI in the workplace is to allow it but regulate it to prevent unwanted negative externalities such as job losses.”

“ According to the key literature outlined in this paper , teachers should be paid more than they currently are, given that they contribute significantly to social and economic development of societies.”

38. From an evaluation of the above arguments

This point doesn’t lean on evidence for your conclusion directly, but it does lean on the culminated evidence of the arguments you’ve put forward. You’re saying that you have put forward a range of arguments, and now, you’re going to powerfully sum them up and present your final thesis statement.

“ From an evaluation of the above arguments , the most compelling argument is that students should still be given homework, despite the fact there is evidence on both sides of the homework argument.”

“ From an evaluation of the above arguments , it is the position of this paper that schools should start later to allow children to sleep in and therefore be more rested when it is time to study.”

39. The balance of evidence finds

This statement highlights that you have looked at both the pros and cons of your topic before coming to a position. The metaphor of ‘balance’ makes us think of someone holding the points for one side of the argument in one hand, the opposing points in the other hand, and they’re weighing each up before deciding which is heavier.

“ The balance of evidence finds that essays help students to reinforce their knowledge, learn more deeply, and develop academic skills.”

“ The balance of evidence finds that taxation should be lowered in order to stimulate economic growth which, on balance, will lead to a more prosperous and thriving society.”

40. The research compellingly indicates

Lastly, the phrase “the research compellingly indicates” can be used in a transition to a conclusion because it demonstrates that you’re about to sum up all the research you’ve just made and you’re going to make a final evaluation.

“ The research compellingly indicates that visiting the doctor for a yearly check-up saves money overall, prevents backlog in hospitals, and prolongs life.”

“ The research compellingly indicates that essay writing helps students to learn their topics more deeply, develop critical thinking skills, and improve long-term retention of knowledge.”

Other Types Of Transition Words

• Compare and Contrast: In comparison, In contrast, However, Despite this, Other researchers argue, Unlike the above point, Conflicting research finds
• Cause and Effect : Therefore, Thus, As a result, This has led to, As a result, Because, Consequently, For that reason, Hence, For that reason
• List Order: First, Second, Third, Forth, In the first instance, In the second instance, Firstly, Secondly, Next, Lastly, Finally
• Time Order: Afterwards, Concurrently, Later, Meanwhile, Following, In the meantime, Simultaneously, Concomitantly, Subsequently
• Evidence Transition Words : As can be seen in, To demonstrate, Evidence of this fact can be seen in, Proof of this point is found in, For instance, For one thing, Compelling evidence shows
• Transitioning to examples : For example, for instance, as illustrated by, take the following case in point.
• Emphasis and addition : In fact, Indeed, Furthermore, Particularly, Surely, Undeniably, Indesputably, Confirms, Certifies, Proves
• Similarity: Similarly, In a similar way, Concurring research finds, likewise, equivalently, also, significantly

Well, how would someone conclude an article about how to write a good conclusion? I’ll finish up like this: every conclusion is unique. Work on your own writerly voice, come up with your own transition words for conclusions, and be creative with it. The biggest challenge you will face is staying within the formal guidelines of an academic essay. For this, rely on your teacher. Keep asking for feedback, and even specifically ask for feedback on your transition words. This will help you learn what your teacher prefers and help you to keep refining your writing style.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 5 Top Tips for Succeeding at University
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 50 Durable Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 100 Consumer Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 30 Globalization Pros and Cons

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Conclusion transition words: Phrases for summarizing and ending

Transition words help us structure our thoughts and guide the reader or listener through what we are saying. When it’s time to summarize your message or end a paragraph, conclusion transition words let you signal this closing.

It’s good to know some synonyms for ‘in conclusion’ and ‘to conclude’, because although these are good examples of concluding words, they can get repetitive.

Our comprehensive list of transition words for conclusion and summary should give you all the inspiration you need, whether you are writing an essay or speech, or just want to become more confident forming an argument. These signal words can also be helpful for restating ideas, drawing attention to key points as you conclude.

We have included plenty of examples of how you can use these transition words for concluding paragraphs or sentences, so by the end of this article, you should be clear on how to use them properly.

Conclusion transition words with examples

We have grouped these summarizing and concluding transition words according to how and where they can be used. For example, some should only be used when forming a final conclusion, whereas others can be used to summarize sections mid-way through your speech or writing.

First, let’s be clear about the difference between a summary and a conclusion .

Summary vs conclusion

A conclusion comes at the end of a speech, chapter, or piece of text, and it brings together all of the points mentioned. A summary, however, can be placed anywhere (even at the beginning). A summary gives a brief outline of the main points but is not as in-depth as a conclusion.

If you are giving a presentation or writing a blog, you may wish to summarize the main points in your introduction so that people know what you are going to cover. You could also summarize a section part-way through before moving on to another angle or topic.

In contrast, the conclusion always comes at the end, and you should only use specific conclusion transition words as you are drawing to a close.

Transition words for conclusion paragraphs

Let’s begin with some discourse markers that signal you are moving to the concluding paragraph in your presentation, speech, essay, or paper. These can all be used to start a conclusion paragraph.

• In conclusion
• To conclude
• We can conclude that
• Given these points
• In the final analysis
• As can be seen
• In the long run
• When all is said and done
• I’ll end by
• As we draw to a close

The last three on this list, the ‘closing’ transition words, would generally only be used in spoken discourse.

Some transition words for order and sequencing should also help with structuring what you want to say, including the ending.

Example conclusion sentences

The following sentences show how to use conclusion words correctly:

• In conclusion , we can say that plan A will be of greater benefit to the company.
• When all is said and done , it’s clear that we should steer clear of this investment strategy.
• Given these points , I believe the trial was a great success.
• I’ll end by reminding you all that this experiment was just the beginning of a much larger project.
• To wrap up , let’s look at how this learning can be applied.
• In the long run , we will make more profit by investing heavily in new machinery.
• Having analyzed seven of our competitors in detail, we can conclude that our content marketing strategy should be updated.

Transition words for summary

The following summary transition words may be used as part of a conclusion paragraph, but they are especially helpful for concisely drawing together several points.

• To summarize
• On the whole
• Generally speaking
• All things considered
• In a nutshell (informal)
• In any case

Note that although you can insert summary transition words anywhere, the specific phrases ‘In summary’, ‘To summarize’ and ‘To sum up’ are generally only used at the end, similar to conclusion phrases.

Example summary sentences

• In brief , this presentation is going to cover the pros and cons of the device and how we can apply this to our own product development.
• This new technology is, in a word , revolutionary.
• All things considered , we found that Berlin was a great city for a weekend break.
• To summarize , we can say that Shakespeare’s writing continues to have a global influence.
• We can say that the combustion engine was, on the whole , a good invention.
• In any case , we should put the necessary precautions in place.
• Generally speaking , girls are more thoughtful than boys.

Transition words to end a paragraph

You may wish to add ending transition words in the final sentence of a paragraph to conclude the ideas in that section of text, before moving on to another point.

Here are some transition words to conclude a paragraph:

• This means that
• With this in mind
• By and large
• For the most part

Note that some of these could equally be used to begin a new paragraph, so long as that paragraph is summarizing the points previously mentioned.

Cause and effect transition words could also be helpful in this context.

Examples of transition words for the end of a paragraph

• Jamie is a vegan and Sheryl has a lot of allergies. This means that we should be careful which restaurant we choose.
• The weather forecast said it would rain this afternoon. With this in mind , should we postpone our hike?
• Each of the students has their own opinion about where to go for the field trip. Ultimately , though, it’s the teacher who will decide.

Restating points as you conclude

Conclusion transition words can also signal that you are restating a point you mentioned earlier. This is common practice in both writing and speaking as it draws the reader or listener’s attention back to something you want them to keep in mind. These are, therefore, also examples of transition words for emphasizing a point .

Here are some helpful transition words for concluding or summarizing by restating points:

• As mentioned previously
• As stated earlier
• As has been noted
• As shown above
• As I have said
• As I have mentioned
• As we have seen
• As has been demonstrated

You may switch most of these between the passive and active voice, depending on which is most appropriate. For example, ‘As has been demonstrated’ could become ‘As I have demonstrated’ and ‘As shown above’ could become ‘As I have shown’.

Example sentences to restate a point in conclusion or summary

• As I stated earlier , the only way we can get meaningful results from this survey is by including at least a thousand people.
• As has been demonstrated throughout this conference, there are exciting things happening in the world of neuroscience.
• As shown by this study, the trials have been promising.

If you were researching these transition words for concluding an essay, you might find it helpful to read this guide to strong essay conclusions . Of course, there are many ways to use summary transition words beyond essays. They may be a little formal for casual conversation, but they certainly can be used in speech as part of a presentation, debate, or argument.

Can you think of any other concluding words or phrases that should be on this list? Leave a comment below to share them!

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• The Case for Marrying an Older Man

A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help.

In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.

When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.

So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me.  But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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The Kim Mulkey way

The lsu coach holds grudges, battles everyone — and keeps winning. but at what cost.

TICKFAW, La. — In the two sisters’ minds, the old house remains as it was: a one-story brick ranch a hundred yards off the road, white fence under two ancient oaks, tin roof long before it all caved in.

Their father built on the farmland he had inherited. Dug a swimming pool, poured the concrete for a basketball court, carved two softball fields into pasture. His two girls, born less than a year apart, would grow up running and hiding and disappearing among the pines.

“I just miss the memories,” Tammy, the 60-year-old younger sister, says.

They’re in the backyard in her favorite, shooting baskets with Daddy by starlight. It feels so real, she says. So precious and warm.

“I wish I could have it all back,” she says.

FIFTY MILES SOUTH AND WEST , a massive crowd is here to watch the older sister, to wear sequins like her, to cheer on her team. Five decades have passed since Kim Mulkey’s father first bounced a basketball to his daughters, explaining the keys to victory.

Speed. Stamina. Grit.

The game itself hasn’t changed much, but everything else around Mulkey has. It’s a Sunday in early March, the same day Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old career scoring record will fall. More than 13,000 people are packed into the LSU arena named for Maravich, and Tigers alumnus and former NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal is in the tunnel. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of star LSU forward Angel Reese on the front and her nickname, “Bayou Barbie,” in hot pink letters on the back.

Reese strolls onto the floor. Fans chant “One more year!” pleading with her to stay in college. And because the value of her name, image and likeness (NIL) rights is estimated to be worth multiples more than the $240,000 WNBA maximum salary, she just might.

“Times are different,” Mulkey will say in a news conference following the game. “You can be beautiful. You can be talented. You can be tough. You can be you.”

Few live that last part more than Mulkey, who wears feathers almost as dramatically as she ruffles them. Her outfits during games are legendary, and during last year’s NCAA tournament , fans wanted to see Reese and her teammates tear through the bracket, sure. But they also wanted to see what their coach might wear, say or do next.

She explodes at officials and is suspicious of reporters. Mulkey declined repeated interview requests for this story, and after LSU received an email from The Washington Post seeking comment on various elements of this story, she used two NCAA tournament news conferences to take aim at The Post’s reporting , threatening legal action in the event of “a false story.” LSU declined to comment.

“Not many people are in a position to hold these kinds of journalists accountable,” she said. “But I am, and I’ll do it.”

It’s by no means her first or most high-profile controversy. In 2013, the NCAA suspended Mulkey for a tournament game after she criticized referees. She later publicly defended Baylor, her former employer, amid a sexual assault scandal in its football program. In November, she told reporters after a road game that they could blame her if they were sick at Thanksgiving.

“I ain’t a sissy,” she said , holding a tissue and choking back sniffles. “I’ve got some kind of cold. It might be covid, but I ain’t testing.”

She is also known to hold grudges and clash with players, including about their appearances and displays of their sexuality, according to interviews with former players and news reports . Mulkey and Brittney Griner, the coach’s biggest star at Baylor, have feuded for more than a decade. And while Griner’s 294-day detainment in a Russian prison eventually required White House intervention, it wasn’t enough to ease tension long after Griner first said Mulkey encouraged gay players to hide their sexuality and “keep your business behind closed doors,” Griner wrote in her memoir.

“Kim Mulkey is an amazing coach; the reason I went to Baylor is because of her,” says Kelli Griffin, who played for Mulkey from 2007 to 2010. But, Griffin says, “She made my life hell” by drawing attention to Griffin’s clothes and issuing a suspension that ultimately ended the player’s career. And she believes it started after Mulkey found out she was gay.

Mulkey’s attorneys, in letters to The Post, denied that Mulkey treated gay players “more harshly or differently.” They provided an affidavit from former Baylor player Morghan Medlock, who said that she was in a relationship with Griffin and that she never witnessed Mulkey mistreat Griffin or other gay athletes. Former Baylor and LSU player Alexis Morris put it more bluntly to ESPN: “Coach Mulkey is not homophobic.”

Mulkey, in a 2013 interview with OutSports , insisted that she didn’t care about players’ sexuality and wouldn’t ask them about it.

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” she said then. “Whoever you are. I don’t care to know that.”

Her conflicts with star players are over other issues too, though, and they have continued at LSU, even as players’ leverage and celebrity swell. She benched Reese for four games this season for reasons the coach refused to explain, weeks after appearing to call out Reese for a poor shooting performance. (Reese did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment.) Mulkey told a supporter last year that Reese had been left off an awards list because of her GPA, according to email obtained via public records request by The Post. In another email, Mulkey complained that Reese was one of several players who “stay on that social media crap.”

Mulkey is many things, among them a 5-foot-4 hoops whisperer, an exceptional teacher , a coach willing to dive deeply into players’ emotions to push them past their preconceived limits. She is also one of college basketball’s most colorful personalities, viewed by some as an almost cartoonishly ornery supervillain. Regardless, as the women’s game finally takes center stage, she is an essential part of the show. In last year’s national championship game, she wore a sequined, technicolor ensemble and unfurled the best game plan of her life.

LSU forced Iowa star Caitlin Clark to battle for every shot, every touch, every step. The Tigers shut off access to the lane, allowing Clark to be predictably lethal from long range but otherwise one-dimensional, enough for LSU’s blowout win and one achievement that eluded even Shaq and “Pistol Pete”: a national title.

It was Mulkey’s seventh as a player or coach, and even in victory she was sarcastic and prickly.

“Coaches are hollering, ‘Get off the court,’ ” Mulkey snapped after winning the 2023 tournament, her fourth title as a head coach. “And I said: ‘Don’t tell me what to do; I’m fixing to win another championship.’ ”

Coaches don’t win 723 games, reach five Final Fours and hang around this long by being cuddly. Mulkey isn’t your grandmother or your mascot, and while everyone else is fighting for women’s basketball, she’s fighting against something because it’s the fight that drives her. Even if you played for her, won for her, loved her.

“I’ll just say she doesn’t care about winning the popularity contest among coaches,” longtime Texas A&M coach Gary Blair says. “She wouldn’t want to.”

So, yes, all of this — the sold-out arenas, television ratings, attention — is well and good. A fire is finally rising in the women’s game.

Where have you been?

Because Mulkey is the fire, and she has been burning for 40 years, too busy laying waste to everything and everyone in her path to be impressed by Clark, Shaq or anyone else trying to soak in this storybook moment.

BACK WHEN THE FOOTAGE was grainy, if it existed at all, she was poetry in pigtails: whirling passes behind her back, between her legs, past opponents. Sonja Hogg knew Louisiana Tech would be getting speed and grit when she recruited Mulkey, but was it too much to hope for more?

“I thought maybe she’d grow a little bit,” Hogg says now.

No such luck, but in the early 1980s, women’s basketball teams took what they could get. There was no money for private jets or elaborate team dinners, so the Lady Techsters dined on fast food on bus rides to Texas and Oklahoma. And not even the nice bus. That one was reserved for the men’s team, leaving only the “Blue Goose,” such a rattletrap that the travel itinerary built in extra time for breakdowns.

Home games were social affairs, and everyone wanted to see the newest member of Hogg’s quintet. A point guard raining down 30 shots per game, as Clark sometimes does, would have been unseemly anywhere in 1982. But at Louisiana Tech, coaches just wouldn’t have allowed it. Mulkey’s job was to run the offense, distribute the ball, do things precisely Hogg’s way.

The right way.

Hogg (rhymes with “rogue”) was the visionary, the strategist, the program’s good cop. Assistant coach Leon Barmore was the hard-ass. Fit in, do right or go see the enforcer for a profanity-laced rant or a date with the arena stairs.

“Back in the day,” former Louisiana Tech player Mickie DeMoss says, “they didn’t have to explain why. You get there, or you’re going to run.”

Louisianans drove hours to watch the Lady Techsters, so named because the men’s mascot was the Bulldogs and, as Hogg once pointed out, “a lady dog is a bitch.” Hogg required her players to be ladylike, and little girls wore their hair braided like Mulkey’s as they squeezed into Memorial Gym. The arena could fit 5,200, but Hogg says if she greased the Ruston fire marshal with tickets, he would allow in a thousand more.

Because Hogg put on a show . Tennessee’s Pat Summitt wore pantsuits. Ohio State’s Tara VanDerveer donned sweaters. Cheyney’s C. Vivian Stringer occasionally wore a skirt. Hogg drove a white Cadillac, wore beaver skin or mink, styled her platinum hair into a towering meringue.

“I couldn’t be dragging around in some sweatsuit,” she says now. “I mean, I wore warmups during practice and tennis shoes and whatever, but gah -lee , you don’t do that on the sideline .”

Louisiana Tech smoked Tennessee in the 1982 Final Four , stirring whispers that Summitt was a fine coach but a choker in big games, and met Cheyney in the final. Hogg directed traffic in a dusty rose and light pink blouse, shell necklace and wool crepe pants as Stringer’s press initially put Louisiana Tech in a sleeper hold.

But Mulkey had the speed to break the press, crash the lane, lay it in. The smarts to recognize when a defender dropped into a zone before pulling up to drain one from deep. Hogg and Barmore freed Mulkey up to riff because she had the conditioning to let her ignore fatigue and continue punishing her opponents, choking them out, stomping the court and beaming as time expired. Tech won by 14, and Mulkey got hooked on winning NCAA championships after one taste.

“She looked like a cheerleader jumping,” Hogg recalls of Mulkey, who went 130-6 as a college player and reached the Final Four every year. “She wants perfection. That’s what she was always seeking.”

AS SOON AS LES MULKEY got out of the Marine Corps in 1963, he started clearing: strawberry vines, bushes, weeds and juvenile pines, even dairy cows from the playing surfaces he had been imagining for six years.

His father had given his two sons 25 acres to share off a highway in Tangipahoa Parish. Les’s younger brother planned to raise horses on his half. Les liked competition, one way to channel his overflowing energy, and if all went right, he would soon be hosting weekend softball tournaments and pickup basketball games.

Les signed Kim up to play youth baseball, then took the league to court when it refused to admit a girl, she later wrote. She made all-stars the next year. He took his daughters with him to play weeknight hoops, and if his team was a man down, he would draft Kim.

“ Her ?” an opponent once asked.

“You scared?” Les said.

A lifelong LSU fan, he hoped Kim would play college basketball for the Ben-Gals, as they were initially known. But when she picked Tech, he made the four-hour trip to Ruston for home games, slipping into the gym and fading into the crowd to watch his little girl.

“He was so proud of me,” Kim wrote, “and I was so proud that he was my dad.”

Some nights, though, there were no games. Les and Dru, Kim’s mom, went dancing sometimes. Other nights he would go drinking as he used to in the Corps, he says, ending up in another woman’s bed. With his daughters in college, Les left Dru and married another woman. She wasn’t much older than Tammy and Kim.

In 1987, the WNBA was a decade away. After playing at Tech, Mulkey moved down the bench as an assistant coach. And a few years after that, she wrote, her boyfriend and a colleague in the athletic department, Randy Robertson, presented her a jack-in-the-box with an engagement ring inside. He was popular and gregarious. She hated parties and crowds, had never taken a sip of alcohol. She said yes anyway, planning to toast with 7 Up at the wedding.

Les packed his tuxedo and made the familiar drive to Ruston. His new wife could attend, Kim advised, but only if she sat in the rear, away from the family. The way Kim saw it, sister Tammy says, her dad hadn’t just walked out on his family. He had quit on the people who depended on him, the worst thing a person can do.

Through her attorneys, Mulkey derided The Post for contacting family members, saying they did not “relate in any way to her career.” But Mulkey herself wrote about her dad’s infidelity and their estrangement in her 2007 autobiography, “Won’t Back Down.”

“His unfaithfulness to my mother devastated our entire family,” she wrote.

Still, Les figured, if he talked to her in person, Kim would come to her senses. But she wouldn’t budge. Neither would Les. His daughter walked down the aisle alone.

They haven’t spoken since.

CAN YOU IMAGINE KIM MULKEY begging? For anything? She says it happened in 2000, when she dropped to her knees before Louisiana Tech President Daniel Reneau.

Hogg was gone, but Barmore and Mulkey kept the Techsters machine humming: seven more Final Fours and the 1988 championship. Barmore was an unrelenting competitor, and by the end of the 1999-2000 season, he and Mulkey were butting heads more often. After he called her out in front of the team, she later wrote, Mulkey reached a breaking point. She requested a transfer to a different department as she searched for a new coaching job, and Barmore apologized and stepped down. He lobbied for Mulkey to get a shot.

Reneau was willing to consider it, but he offered only a three-year contract. Mulkey, then 37, wanted five. When they met in the president’s office, Mulkey wrote: “I got out of my chair, onto my knees, and begged that man for a five-year contract. Tears were flying everywhere.” (Reneau did not return calls and messages seeking comment.)

Few things are more important to Mulkey than loyalty, codified during the 1984 Olympics . Mulkey had broken her foot and expected to be sent home, but Summitt, the Tennessee legend, declared that Mulkey had earned her spot. Team USA won the gold medal, and Mulkey forever saw Summitt as a mentor and friend.

Reneau showed no such commitment.

“I just wanted Dan Reneau to say, ‘Hey, Kim, you know we’ll take care of you, you’re one of us,’ ” Mulkey wrote. “But the man was so cold.”

She took the job at Baylor, replacing Hogg, of all people. Mulkey said later that she never spoke to Reneau again.

AT BAYLOR’S FIRST CONDITIONING SESSION under its new coach, in the spring of 2000, forward Danielle Crockrom says, Mulkey approached and collected a fistful of the exhausted player’s jersey.

“Push past this point,” she says Mulkey told her, “and you’ll be an all-American.”

But team captain? Not now, maybe not ever, Crockrom recalls being told. Because, according to Crockrom’s telling, Mulkey knew the player had gotten burned out the previous season and stepped away for two weeks. She had quit. On her teammates, her coaches, herself. Then she had gone to Baylor’s athletic director to complain about Hogg and the team’s direction, Crockrom says now, leading to the staff shake-up.

Mulkey blew the whistle, ordering more sprints, reminding everyone, Crockrom says, that she had set the wheels of agony in motion by complaining.

“Be careful what you ask for,” Crockrom says. She wouldn’t fully understand the purpose until later. “This is what you need to be disrupted, to pull out the potential in you. I had potential in me that I hadn’t even begun to scratch.”

That season, Baylor won 21 games and reached the NCAA tournament for the first time. Crockrom was indeed named an all-American. The Bears lost in the first round, though, and Mulkey told players this was only the beginning. “We might have raised the bar too early,” Mulkey said with a chuckle after the loss.

There was more work to do, even if that meant Mulkey’s process wasn’t for everyone.

“The weeding-out process,” Crockrom says.

Mulkey handed out playbooks, Crockrom says, then yanked them away. She made the team run her plays again and again until calls resulted in a Pavlovian, muscle-memory response. Crockrom says Mulkey made post players keep pace with guards, using structured failure to push beyond physical and emotional barriers. She scheduled more and more conditioning sessions, one starting earlier than the last.

Because know who else was up and grinding? VanDerveer at Stanford. Geno Auriemma at Connecticut. Summitt at Tennessee. All were building perennial championship contenders as the women’s game competed for eyeballs on the increasingly crowded sports landscape. Lisa Leslie could dunk; Candace Parker could throw down against boys; Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi anchored a U-Conn. team that couldn’t lose.

Mulkey paid special attention to Summitt, whom coaching peers praised not just for doing things the proverbial right way but her way, establishing a standard and a recruiting pipeline and a juggernaut, all while raising a son.

Back when she was still an assistant, Mulkey had leaned on Summitt when she and Randy learned, in 1991, they were expecting a baby girl. She was running Louisiana Tech’s summer camp at the time, plus overseeing academics and acting as recruiting coordinator. She was “in a depression,” she would tell the Dallas Morning News in 2012 , and thought it would be impossible to add a daughter to the mix, especially when —

Summitt interjected.

You can , she told her. It’s possible to be a great coach and a great mother .

Mulkey believed Summitt, always her North Star, and took Makenzie on a recruiting trip when she was two weeks old. She breastfed Kramer, the couple’s infant son, before and after practices and games. Mulkey wrote that, by the time they moved to Waco, the kids had learned to give their mom space, especially after losses, and stop asking why she cussed so much.

She leaned into the things that made her at Louisiana Tech because those things won. Only she sometimes played the roles of Hogg and Barmore: approachable emissary while handing out stuffed bears at Waco bingo halls and nursing homes, a former Baylor colleague says, and ruthless taskmaster who, according to multiple former players, might single out anyone who seemed distracted or was having a tough day.

“If you’re having a hard time with something or you’re not performing at the level that she would like you to be, then get ready,” says Emily Niemann, a swing player who joined the team in 2003. “Because there’s no holding back.”

Niemann’s vertical jump was a mere 13 inches, and she says Mulkey brought it up constantly, instructing the team not to throw Niemann a lob pass because she wouldn’t catch it. Sometimes Mulkey’s comments felt like a joke, Niemann says; other times she felt humiliated.

In the 2004 NCAA tournament, fourth-seeded Baylor ran into Tennessee in the Sweet 16. The teams were tied as time expired, but officials huddled and determined that Baylor’s Jessika Stratton had fouled Tasha Butts. After Butts made two free throws, Summitt’s team advanced.

Mulkey never mentioned the loss again. The team nonetheless remembered, and the next season, Baylor crushed NCAA tournament opponents by an average of 15 points. Niemann made five three-pointers in a title-game beatdown of Michigan State.

“She’s so locked in and intense that it trickles down to everybody,” Niemann says. “And when you have a whole team of people where every loose ball matters, every deflection matters, every block-out, every trip down the floor — everything matters.

“It’s emotionally draining. On the other hand, it gets results.”

THREE MONTHS LATER, Niemann says, Mulkey summoned her to the coach’s office. The player had been seen around Waco with a woman, and people had begun murmuring about her sexuality.

“It’s not a good look,” Niemann says Mulkey told her. Baylor is the world’s largest Baptist university, and its policy still prohibits premarital sex and defines marriage as between a man and woman. Mulkey advised Niemann to be careful because the program would be watching.

For months, Niemann had struggled with questions about her identity, slowly coming to grips with being queer, she says. The product of a conservative home in Houston, a graduate of a Christian school and now a player at Baylor, she found many of her feelings were in conflict with her surroundings.

“I can’t talk to anyone,” she says now. “I couldn’t find a way to make things feel right.”

She was thinking of transferring, Niemann says, and met with Mulkey and her parents about it. Mulkey was flabbergasted, the coach wrote in her memoir, adding that among Niemann’s reasons for wanting to leave Baylor was that Mulkey was sometimes too hard on players.

“This is how I do what I do,” Niemann recalls the coach saying. “And if you can’t take it, maybe you should leave.”

Niemann left. Later, she wrote that she “did not leave Baylor because coach Mulkey is homophobic.” The coach, Niemann wrote, was only expressing opinions that were the “dominant belief system” on campus.

Mulkey wrote about Niemann in her memoir, suggesting that “unhappiness comes from within one’s soul” and that Niemann’s experience was an isolated case.

Other players point out that hard coaching is a key driver of Mulkey’s success, even as her peers go softer amid the shifting power dynamics of college sports. For Mulkey, players say, that often extends to comments about players’ hairstyles, tattoos and makeup.

“She hates my different hair colors,” former Bears guard DiDi Richards says. “ ‘Why is your hair purple?’ ‘Are you going to wear them two ponytails?’ If you would change the color, she’d go, ‘You and these damn colors.’ ” The comments came from a place of affection, Richards believes. They could get personal, too, though Richards says they show how Mulkey pushes players, physically and emotionally, in pursuit of wins.

Mulkey’s attorneys described the comments as “good-natured banter, as often happens on and around the court.”

A few months after Baylor’s first championship, Mulkey’s husband told her he felt neglected. They attended couples counseling, Mulkey would write, and she offered to leave coaching. Robertson nonetheless wanted to end their marriage. “I told Randy … that he better be sure,” Mulkey wrote, “because there was no turning back.” (Robertson did not respond to an email.)

By this point, those in Mulkey’s orbit had learned that disloyalty could result in harsh consequences. Les Mulkey sent notes to his daughter, pleading for reconciliation, but Mulkey wrote that she returned them unread. After Reneau, the former Louisiana Tech president, sent Mulkey a message congratulating her on the national championship, Mulkey would say later, it sat unopened on her desk for years.

“Talk to that man?” she told the Dallas Morning News in 2012. “That’s not who I am.”

AT BAYLOR, MULKEY IMPORTED a layer of trust by surrounding herself with past allies: Barmore, who came out of retirement to be an assistant coach; a longtime Louisiana Tech booster to oversee Baylor’s budget and travel; and a former Techsters team manager to handle recruiting.

Everything Mulkey did, at least as it related to basketball, worked: two Sweet 16s in five years and, in 2010, another Final Four. Texas kids dreamed of wearing the green and gold, and when Kelli Griffin was in seventh grade, she wrote a paper about someday leaving Houston to play for Kim Mulkey.

Griffin had come out in high school, but though she and Mulkey never explicitly discussed her sexuality while she was being recruited, Griffin says now that it was “obvious” and that she assumed Mulkey knew. She promised Griffin’s mother, Madine, that Baylor was a “family” and that she would protect Kelli.

Not long after Griffin arrived on campus, she says, Mulkey began asking why she dressed like a boy: baggy jeans, basketball shorts, sweats. A lady, Griffin says the coach told her, wears a dress. “Okay, this lady might not like gay people,” Griffin recalls thinking.

She considered transferring, but in 2008, one of Griffin’s friends and former AAU teammates committed to Baylor. Brittney Griner was a 6-foot-8 phenom and YouTube dunking sensation who, not long after reporting to campus, grabbed a rebound, glided the length of the court with the ball, then dunked it.

“Dang, Kim,” Barmore said in an interview. “I think we’ve got something here.”

Griner is gay, but she didn’t come out publicly until 2013, after her final game at Baylor. Still, whenever Mulkey sensed Griner was distracted or stressed, Mulkey blamed “girlfriend problems,” Griner later wrote, even if Griner wasn’t dating anyone. “She sounded like she was speaking a foreign language,” Griner wrote.

“Maybe she would have understood me better,” Griner wrote, “if I had shared more with her, but there was always a little bit of a disconnect with us, because I never really knew if Kim fully accepted me for who I am.”

Mulkey also called out players if they gained weight, instructing the team’s strength coach to conduct weigh-ins in front of the team, according to Griffin and another player. Players weren’t to bring non-basketball matters to Mulkey, they say, encouraged to confide in assistant coaches instead. And Niemann and multiple other former players say shame was a frequent tool in Mulkey’s coaching arsenal, whether during practice drills or in addresses to the team. Some of these former players spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears of retaliation in the close-knit women’s basketball community.

Mulkey’s attorneys said the former players’ allegations were too vague to respond to.

Mulkey didn’t like the stars tattooed on Griner’s shoulders because, the player later wrote, they sent the “wrong message.” Griner pacified her coach by wearing a T-shirt under her jersey.

“It seemed like all she cared about was the image of the program as seen through the eyes of a very specific segment of the population,” Griner wrote. “Just once, I wanted her to stop worrying about what everyone else thought and stand by my side.”

In 2010, Griffin was the second-ranked Bears’ starting point guard. One night, Griffin says, an ex-girlfriend and Bears teammate showed up at Griffin’s home, and a fight broke out.

Griffin says she called Mulkey to report the incident, and the next morning, Mulkey announced that Griffin would be suspended indefinitely. The teammate, whom Griffin wouldn’t identify to The Post because, she said, the teammate had not come out as gay, wasn’t punished, according to Griffin. In a separate interview, Griffin’s mom, Madine, also recalled that the other player wasn’t suspended.

Griffin says she confronted Mulkey to ask why she was being penalized and that Mulkey told her she was owed no explanation.

“I thought I did everything I was supposed to,” she says.

After The Post asked Mulkey’s representatives about these events, they provided a statement from the former player, Morghan Medlock, who was in a relationship with Griffin at the time. Medlock claimed Griffin was actually suspended for using marijuana.

In a phone interview the next day, Medlock reiterated that Mulkey “never knew” there had been an altercation between Griffin and Medlock. Griffin just stopped coming to practice, Medlock said. Medlock said she did not remember how she learned the reason Griffin was suspended.

Medlock said she decided to give the statement after receiving a call this week from an individual who falsely claimed Griffin had identified Medlock to The Post.

“If my name never came up, I wouldn’t be on the phone with you right now,” she said. Medlock would not reveal who had contacted her and refused to say when she had last spoken with Mulkey.

“What difference does it make?” she said. “How I got the information, who I got it from, where I got it, that doesn’t matter.”

She then ended the call.

Griffin maintains that she was not suspended for drugs and that she didn’t use marijuana in college. The Baylor women’s basketball spokeswoman from 2010, who’s now retired, told The Post in a text message Wednesday that she was “not privy” to the reason for Griffin’s suspension. Baylor’s current spokesman declined to comment on this and other elements of this article.

Griffin says she told assistant coach Damion McKinney that she intended to transfer because, Griffin says, “I couldn’t play for Kim anymore.” (McKinney did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

But transferring wouldn’t be easy. Long before the NCAA, in 2021, introduced the transfer portal, allowing players to come and go among schools without penalty, players generally needed to be released by one school before pursuing a transfer to another.

Four days after appearing in an exhibition game, the Baylor program released a statement to the media. It didn’t say Griffin intended to transfer.

It said she “quit.”

YEARS PASSED, AND WITH KIM and Tammy grown and gone and their dad starting over, pine seedlings took root on the softball fields. The walls of the pool collapsed and got filled in. The basketball goal was cut down and hauled away. Trash collected on the concrete slab, once the site of late-night competitions; cans rusted; and discarded shoes became waterlogged, becoming moldy and deformed. Someone spray-painted KEEP OUT on a sheet of corrugated metal that replaced a wall, wood beams rotted, pipes sunk into the earth.

The pines matured and swallowed the fields, grass grew, and weeds sprouted, flowered and spread. After nearly four decades, the overgrowth had narrowed the property’s walking paths and obscured the driveway.

The woods had retaken their land, and any evidence that a family had ever been here was gone.

IN SPRING 2016, MULKEY’S SON , who’s now 29, convinced her it was time to go see Summitt . The legendary Tennessee coach, perhaps Mulkey’s dearest friend in coaching, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years earlier.

Summitt was in a senior living facility in Knoxville, and Mulkey knew what visiting her meant. Kim kept saying “I love ya,” she would tell reporters later, and Pat kept saying it back. Four weeks later, Summitt was gone.

This was the same year that Baylor fired football coach Art Briles after a damning investigation of the football program’s coverup of at least 17 acts of sexual or domestic assault by 19 players. Mulkey went on the attack. She snapped at reporters who brought up the scandal, saying she was “tired of hearing” about it, then turned a postgame speech after her 500th career win into a pulpit.

“If somebody is around you and they ever say, ‘I will never send my daughter to Baylor,’ you knock them right in the face,” she said. Mulkey later apologized.

The school’s leaders, many of whom had been brought in to restore the school’s reputation, found themselves dealing with new headaches involving Mulkey. Even before Baylor announced plans to replace the old Ferrell Center with a new arena, Mulkey told peers that she expected the court to be named for her.

Baylor declined The Post’s requests to interview Athletic Director Mack Rhoades and school president Linda Livingstone.

Mulkey distanced herself further from players whose time at Baylor had ended abruptly or unexpectedly. When Niemann returned to campus for a celebration of Baylor’s 2005 championship, it was an important step in her process of healing, she says.

“I wanted to go back to the place,” Niemann says, “and step back into that gym and re-engage with that community and not have my head held down in shame. That’s what I needed to do: This is me; this is who I am. I did some awesome things, I made some poor decisions, and this is still a part of my life.”

Niemann found Mulkey and approached her. Niemann says she thanked her former coach for the impact she had made on her life and said she was sorry for the way things ended.

Niemann said Mulkey said nothing and walked away.

“There was just nothing there,” she says. “There was no warmth. There was no nothing.”

Three months after Mulkey contracted the coronavirus in 2021, forcing the cancellation of a home game against U-Conn., she urged the NCAA to “dump” testing for the virus . A few weeks later, Mulkey approached Baylor administrators to let them know she had an offer from LSU. She planned to accept unless Baylor gave her a better deal.

In a decision that rocked the industry, the school made no counteroffer.

ONE MONDAY MORNING IN 2022 , LSU players arrived at the basketball facility and were greeted with an unusual directive: Turn off your phones and put them in the other room.

Mulkey went ballistic. Days earlier, two LSU players had gotten into a fight. Teammates got between them, but the two kept at it, with spit flying and glass thrown. The scene had unfolded in front of a group of visiting recruits.

“My regret in this life,” one of the people present says, “I didn’t record this meeting.”

That was impossible, though, because at Baylor and now at LSU, former players say, staffers sometimes mitigated the risk of Mulkey’s tirades being recorded by barring phones from the room. (Mulkey’s attorneys did not address this incident in their responses to The Post.)

It had been a tense year already. Earlier in 2022, Griner, now starring for the Phoenix Mercury, was detained at an airport in Russia , where, like many WNBA players, she supplemented her earnings by playing overseas. Officials claimed she had vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage.

WNBA players wore Griner’s No. 42 during the All-Star Game, and Seattle Storm player Sue Bird pleaded for Griner to be released. NBA star Stephen Curry spoke out in support of Griner, and President Biden signed an executive order threatening sanctions on any government that wrongfully detained Americans.

It was as if everyone was discussing Griner’s plight. Everyone, that is, except Griner’s college coach.

“And you won’t,” Mulkey shot back at a reporter who said he hadn’t seen her comment on the situation.

Whatever the root of their beef, it had intensified enough that Mulkey would rarely say Griner’s name. She made an exception in June 2022, when Mulkey appeared on the “Tiger Rag” radio show.

“I pray for Brittney,” Mulkey said. “I want her home safely. I think there’s lots of people speaking out on her behalf, and those of us who don’t necessarily speak publicly about it certainly are praying for her.”

Still, former LSU players say, those within the program had learned to avoid mentioning Griner or interacting with social media posts that supported the detained player.

Even in the tightknit coaching community, a frequent discussion topic was Mulkey’s unwillingness to look beyond a grudge.

“I really was hoping that Kim would make a statement. Really hoping she would,” says DeMoss, the former Louisiana Tech player and longtime coach who adds that she considers Mulkey a friend. “You’ve got a kid that’s stuck in Russia; I mean, that’s bigger than any feud that y’all had. No one knew how long they were going to detain her over there.

“We were all hoping [Mulkey] could just rise above it for that moment. Just get her back home. But she didn’t.”

Through her attorneys, Mulkey rebutted any suggestion that she failed to support Griner.

In December 2022, after nearly a year in prison, Griner was released and returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange. The basketball community expressed relief and joy, and reactions — not all supportive, considering the exchange freed a notorious Russian arms dealer — poured out from both sides of the political aisle. Mulkey issued a brief statement to ESPN: “God is good. Prayers are powerful. Brittney is on the way home where she belongs. Our prayers remain with her and her family as they recover and heal together.”

Three months later, after Mulkey reached her fifth Final Four, a reporter asked whether Mulkey had spoken with Griner. She hadn’t. Four days later, Mulkey, in a pink- and gold-sequined jacket, cut down the net and held up a newspaper with Reese pictured and CHAMPS! in massive letters.

Even among some of Mulkey’s ex-players, the enthusiasm was muted.

“As a head coach, you’re responsible for so many people; you’re taking on a role that leaves a very lasting impression,” a former Baylor player says. “You might be able to win us a championship, but are people going to want to come back and see you?”

EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE , Les Mulkey climbs into his work truck, drives past the old property, makes his way 50 miles south and west to Baton Rouge. He hasn’t spoken with his older daughter in 37 years, but same as he used to, he can slip into a gym, fade into the crowd and watch his little girl.

“I love my babies,” he says. “I ain’t ashamed.”

Kim has her daddy’s eyes, the same skeptical eyebrows, the same pride. “They’re just alike,” younger daughter Tammy says. Tammy said in early March that she doesn’t speak to her sister, either. There was some disagreement five or six years ago, Tammy says, but she won’t say what caused it. She believes they will reconnect eventually. “I’m sure we will,” she says. “One day. I hope.”

Les has no such delusions. Isn’t it odd, he says, to love a child so much that you leave them be? It’s how Kim wants it, he says, but he prays every night that, tomorrow, she will want something new. He is 86 now and lives alone, in a dilapidated trailer way out past the pines. It’s where he retreats after his drives to Baton Rouge. He has dozens of pictures, newspaper cutouts, mementos from Kim’s basketball career. Tammy calls it a shrine.

It’s all he has left of her, and with many of Les’s friends dying recently, he thinks about what’s next. He was cocky, he says. Stubborn. A little too proud, he says, so when his time comes, Les figures it will be when he’s alone, surrounded by achievements but not people, wasting away like the things he once built.

LONG AFTER ANOTHER LSU WIN , Mulkey takes a photo with a woman in a wheelchair. Then she points at a crowd assembled beyond the tunnel, lamenting that she’s about to walk into that .

“Kim!” a young fan yells.

“You’ve got to say Coach Mulkey,” an adult corrects.

Mulkey heads that way, drawing cheers, and encourages patience. She will get to everyone, she promises. As the arena empties, the coach signs autographs, raises her eyebrows at the Kim Mulkey bobblehead the school gave out, poses for selfies not far from the banner LSU hung for last year’s championship.

As afternoon turns to evening in Baton Rouge, Mulkey is still signing and chatting with fans. She’s an icon and a winner, one of the best motivators and teachers any sport has seen. But Mulkey is right: Times are different. Long after Summitt’s Tennessee teams slept on gymnasium floors because her program couldn’t afford hotel rooms, Mulkey now makes $3.26 million per year, most in the women’s game. Meanwhile, Louisiana Tech, once a women’s basketball dynasty, hasn’t made the NCAA tournament in a dozen years. Baylor is no longer among the sport’s upper tier, another structure abandoned and left to wither.

Along the LSU baseline, families wait for Mulkey to reach them. When they’ve gotten whatever they’ve been waiting for, they head toward the steps and a row of glass doors. As they walk, fathers tell their kids that was Kim Mulkey they just met, the coach who won all those championships, told it like it is, did it all her way.

Reporters fold their tripods and unplug their microphones from press row. Athletics staffers head toward the Pete Maravich Assembly Center exits. The crowd thins, and workers use a leaf blower to remove trash from empty rows.

“Miss Kim!” a voice calls, and it echoes through the arena. Mulkey walks across the hardwood, sequins glinting and heels clicking, to snap another picture. Then, when they all have what they wanted, the last of the friends, families and groups leave together, beneath a banner marking Mulkey’s latest achievement, and the coach heads back toward the tunnel, off into the evening alone.

Molly Hensley-Clancy in Washington contributed to this report.

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8-Year-Old Survives Bus Plunge Off Bridge That Left 45 People Dead

The bus, which was carrying people from Botswana to an Easter weekend pilgrimage in South Africa, fell 165 feet into a ravine.

By John Eligon

Reporting from Johannesburg

An 8-year-old girl was the sole survivor after a bus carrying 46 people on their way to an Easter weekend pilgrimage in South Africa on Thursday plunged 165 feet from a bridge into a ravine and burst into flames, according to a local department of transportation.

The bus was traveling from Botswana to Moria, a religious pilgrimage site in South Africa’s northeast, when it careered off a bridge winding through the Mmamatlakala mountain pass after the driver “lost control,” the department said in a statement.

Forty-five people, including the driver, were killed.

The girl was receiving medical attention at a nearby hospital, the Limpopo Province department of transportation in South Africa said in a statement . The child was in serious condition, according to another government statement.

“Rescue operations continued until the late hours of Thursday evening, as some bodies were burned beyond recognition, others trapped inside the debris and others scattered on the scene,” the transportation department said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa called his counterpart in Botswana, President Mokgweetsi Masisi, to extend his condolences, the president’s office said in a statement released late Thursday.

The crash occurred in a scenic, mountainous area of winding roads and sweeping vistas about three and a half hours north of Johannesburg. The road on a high overpass bent sharply over a ravine flanked on both sides by rocky, tree-covered slopes.

The area attracts a lot of traffic on Easter weekend for a pilgrimage to Moria, the headquarters of the Zion Christian Church, one of the largest in the country. Mr. Ramaphosa visited last year’s pilgrimage, the first one since the Covid-19 pandemic. South African border officials had said they were bracing for an influx of visitors for this year’s pilgrimage.

The nationalities of the victims have not yet been determined.

The tragedy struck as South Africans prepared for a four-day weekend, with public holidays on Friday and Monday.

Around major holidays, the South African authorities often take extra measures like police roadblocks and publicity campaigns to help prevent traffic accidents. On Wednesday, South Africa’s minister of transport, Sindisiwe Chikunga, started an Easter road-safety campaign, noting that traffic accidents often spiked during the holiday.

“Easter is a time for celebration, but it is also a time when roads can be more dangerous due to increased traffic and holiday festivities,” the ministry warned .

Africa has historically had among the highest road-fatality rates in the world, according to data from the World Bank and the World Health Organization .

South Africa had more than 12,400 road fatalities in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The Automobile Association of South Africa called the traffic deaths a “national crisis” in a statement released last year. The association argued that the government needed to invest more in road safety and to enforce traffic laws better.

“Unless these two issues are dealt with, our country’s abysmal road safety situation will never improve,” it said.

Russell Goldman contributed reporting from New York.

John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa. More about John Eligon