A consolidating conclusion

Any meaningfully long journey will contain so many impressions and details that its report will benefit from a summary. Sure, this summary will sound somewhat similar to the introduction. But now, you place a bigger emphasis on the findings and your reflections thereon. Now would also be the time to think about how you could have travelled and explored differently, and what you really could not fit into your travel plan: the limitations of your journey.

Consequently, writing your conclusion means taking a third step back (with your findings being the first step and the discussion being the second) from your project, and looking at it to write the in-a-nutshell account. Here is the place to tell your audience which other promising destinations you saw on your journey, but only from a distance, and could not cover. Here is also where you would delineate which areas you could not cover during your exploration.

Research means being able to provide an abbreviated, reflective, and integrated account of what you have found, but also to explain where others could take things further.

(This is a preview section. The full chapter on this topic continues with the sections “Rough coordinates”, “Train of thought”, “In essence”, “To reflect”, “Two travellers’ tales”, “Devil’s advocate”, and “How to tackle”.)