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Crafting Your Article’s Perfect Ending
It’s a difficult (and often overlooked) task.
Many a writer has spent a sleepless night trying to write that perfect lede, the one that will smoothly plunge their reader into the story. But their narrative’s conclusion often comes as an afterthought, something thrown together once all the information has been imparted and the deadline-crazed editor or project manager is breathing down the writer’s neck. This is unfortunate, because a successful ending can help preserve a story in the reader’s mind perhaps more effectively than any other narrative section.
Despite this importance (and despite the sheer amount of material written about crafting ideal ledes for stories), professional advice on writing a winning finale tends to be a rarer thing. Indeed, with many stories, the conclusion has traditionally been given the short shrift, a casualty of the inverted pyramid structure that governs most short nonfiction writing; the writer is expected to convey the who, what, when, where, why and how into their first paragraph or two, and then simply end the story posthaste once all the information has been imparted. With space at a premium, an editor will often hack away any ending that attempts for something grander.
But that doesn’t mean an ending should be neglected; they’re still one of your story’s most…
