Crafting a convincing conclusion 3

I learned in school that conclusion should be of the same length as the introduction. And it must be from 10 to 15 percent of your speech. When we tell this formula to students, they start counting their words and call the first fifteen percent and the last fifteen percent the introduction and conclusion respectively.

Conclusion should be just long enough to do best what it is intended to do. If consistent with clearness and effect, the shorter the better. And when you need to cut your speech, choose to reduce your conclusion over your introduction . A very long introduction usually fails. It must be short, clear, and emphatic. It will often produce a deeper, more lasting impression by its very conciseness.

Brevity is the soul of more than mere humor. A brief remark will cut deeper than a long involved sentence. The speaker who had shown that the recent great war fails unless the reconstruction to be accomplished is worthy needed no more involved conclusion than the statement, “It is what we do tomorrow that will justify what we did yesterday.”