What an introduction does. An analytical introduction is a promise to the reader. In three to five sentences it (1) orients the reader: names the text and the idea the question is about; (2) states the thesis: your arguable answer to the question; and (3) signposts the essay: previews the main points or methods each body paragraph will explore, in the order they will appear.

What a conclusion does. A conclusion keeps the promise. It (1) restates the thesis in fresh words, (2) synthesizes the body paragraphs by showing how the points work together rather than listing them again, and (3) ends on the wider significance of the idea. It does not introduce new evidence or new arguments.

The text (original short story summary). In "Low Tide", sixteen-year-old Mara spends a summer working in her aunt's bakery in a fading seaside town. At first her first-person narration is sarcastic: she counts the days until she can leave and mocks the regulars and the town's empty shopfronts. Through the dawn routine of baking, and through daily conversations with an elderly customer, Mr. Okafor, who buys one loaf each morning and reads her the tide times, she begins to notice the town's quiet resilience. When the bakery's oven breaks, neighbors lend their own kitchens so the shop can open. The story ends on Mara's last morning, at dawn, as she chalks the tide times onto the shop's board for Mr. Okafor, who is unwell and cannot come in. The tide recurs throughout the story, and the story opens and closes at dawn.

Essay question: How does the writer of "Low Tide" explore the idea that belonging has to be learned?

Model introduction: (1) In "Low Tide", a short story about a teenager's summer in a struggling seaside town, the writer explores how belonging is not simply given to us by a place but must be learned through attention and care. (2) Mara's journey suggests that a community becomes home only when we stop judging it from the outside. (3) The writer first uses Mara's shifting narrative voice to chart her movement from contempt to connection, (4) then develops the recurring motif of the tide to suggest the slow, patient nature of that change, (5) and finally uses the story's circular structure to show how differently Mara sees the same dawn by the end.

Model conclusion: (6) Ultimately, "Low Tide" presents belonging as something earned through noticing rather than something a place owes us. (7) Mara's softening voice, the steady return of the tide and the transformed final dawn work together to show that her change is gradual, almost invisible until it is complete. (8) In this way, the story invites readers to consider that the places we are quickest to dismiss may be the ones that would hold us, if we learned how to look.