ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Summing up: Use a closing quotation

Sometimes someone else has already summed up the message of your piece quite well. If so, use it.

In the meantime, expatriates like Bowles and McPhillips cling stubbornly to their adopted city. "It still has this attraction, this inexplicable ability to pull at your heart and soul," McPhillips says. "There's the light, the air, the wind blowing through the strait, the interplay between Europe and Morocco that will never change. Tangier is indestructible."

This quotation offers proof of the writer's concluding idea:

Will the wily Mr. Castro change with the times? He seems to be incapable of it—incapable of abandoning his ideology even for the sake of increasing his chances of maintaining power. Fidel himself puts it this way. "It is the world that is changing. Cuba will not change . . . even death will not defeat us."

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