Note: for Writing Project 3, we’ll be taking a slightly different approach than we have for Writing Projects 1 and 2. Specifically, we’ll be approaching this paper in phases. The idea of this approach is that all of these phases will eventually combine to form a larger, more formal essay, which will incorporate writing from all of them, but will build on them in such a way as to make something new.

Within the next couple of days, we should all be finishing our Book Club Books. As we do, we’ll be hearing the writers come to their conclusions—which means more than we might think. We tend to think about the word “conclusion” as meaning “the end”—that is, the last part of a piece of writing. Some of us have also likely learned that a conclusion is a place for summing up or repeating the main ideas of the text—as I was once taught, to “tell them what you’ve told them.”

But “conclusion” also has a logical meaning. When we say that someone “comes to a conclusion,” we don’t mean that they stopped talking; rather, we mean that they figured something out. They looked at the evidence in front of them, and made a decision about its meaning. This is what our writers are doing at the end of their books: they’re looking at the stories they’ve told, the information they’ve gathered, and the arguments they’ve made, and they’re telling us what it all means.

For Phase 3 of Writing Project 3, I’d like for us to do the same.