Sentence Endings

Why should your sentences end with a punch?

A window reflection in Bucharest, Romania of stone buildings⁩ in black and white.

Bucharest 2016

End your sentences with a punch. Find the right word—what snaps, pops, smarts—and ensure that it strikes. Readers linger upon endings. Readers overrate endings. Like a bad novel with a good conclusion, a good finish can improve a poor start. Readers are even inclined to dismiss the suffering and confusion of a long sentence that takes a circuitous, pedestrian route, one that feels endless, full of digressions, seemingly purposeless, as long as the end lands with a smack.

Consider the witty remark that punctuates an evening. Something pithy, memorable, and emphatic. What’s said in closing accentuates what’s said before. Place your empty glass down. Stand and push in your chair. Slam the door and let those final words linger.

Here’s a curious detail: good endings reach backward and amend the past. Writers should be aware of this rather peculiar reversal and remember that a reader’s memory isn’t static. What’s yelled in closing, what appears clever, or what surprises alters what was already perceived. Short jokes are good examples: they are sentences with surprise endings. How you interpret the first words shifts the moment you hear the last words.

Should sentence endings have this outsized influence? Wouldn’t writers want a more balanced judgement? Might an equilibrium between the first and last page be better? Even if writers wish that symmetry true, the facts don’t change—readers are disproportionally affected by what strikes them last.

Even though final words are significant, a book that only contains closing sentences is a perverse goal. Misguided writers might feel a strange incentive: for every sentence to be a climax, toward an explosion of conclusions, to open with a peroration.

Just remember that writing is chronological; readers absorb paragraphs over time. Premises lead to conclusions and that trajectory shoves the reader forward. Although a joke does force a reader to reevaluate a sentence’s beginning, the original false impression was required: a punchline only hits because of the reversal. A good ending is like an unexpected, pleasant aftertaste. Only after it arrives does it seem inevitable. Does your mouth now feel bitter or sweet? Has the effect amplified the food? Is the original taste redefined? What happens sentence by sentence is repeated paragraph by paragraph and reenforced by the grand narrative of the entire book, which, ideally, should culminate in that smack.