Intro, body, conclusion...Magic!(?)

Back when I taught writing, we were told we had to drill into the students' heads that they needed to have an intro paragraph, some body paragraphs, and a final paragraph in which they basically reiterated the intro and drew some kind of conclusion based on the evidence or argument in the body paragraphs. What was so hard to get across was that in that intervening space between beginning and end, between inception and closure, there was supposed to occur a kind of transformative alchemy between the intro and the magical concluding paragraph. In that conclusion, everything was supposed to come together in a package to create something greater than the sum of the essay's parts.

That was the trick -- that secret alchemical process whereby the base metal was turned to gold. There were some students who got it, but most of them just didn't. The really swell part of teaching writing was that nobody quite knew how to impart that secret knowledge. If you scratched the truly decent writers in any composition classroom, chances were that under the surface you found that they had already spent their lives as readers. And that seemed to be the whole secret -- the training they had learned by reading good writing.

As teachers who owned these students for 16 weeks at a time, we couldn't make up in a few weeks for a lifetime of neglect. We could force them to read thousands of words during that brief space during which they were our wards, but the lifelong non-readers in those composition classes always seemed to struggle the hardest to write a decent essay.

So here I am, years later, trying to write a concluding chapter to a non-fiction book about a naturalist/writer. I've only been working on this thing since 2004 or so, and really its history goes all the way back to my dissertation days, back in the dark ages of the 1990s. Since a non-fiction book is often nothing more than an essay writ large, I find that I am taking the same path that my students did. I am taking up the themes I mentioned in the introductory chapter and reiterating them in the conclusion. What I don't know is if that alchemy I was hoping for, and which I used to hope would visit my students sometime during the composition process, has really taken place. So I will spend this weekend beating my head against the wall in hopes that something magical falls out. That's why I spent my life reading....right?