Lily,
I am glad you're liking Diogenes Maxim.
Let me explain the logic behind what we do in Maxim and Chreia to ward off your expectation of how much your daughter should 'get' at this point.
In Maxim we teach all the paragraphs that go with expository essays by example. That is we go over each paragraph by showing how the ancients wrote them, then sometimes a few modern examples. Your daughter at this point is just to read the examples, look at how they are put together, and then do something similar.
In Chreia (the following book) we teach all those same paragraph types systematically. We look at examples of good ancient paragraphs, analyze them, pull them apart, write outlines for what each paragraph should look like, and write detailed introductions, encomia, epilogues, cause paragraphs, etc. where we require that the student generates those paragraphs in a manner consistent with the components that we teach that must be in there.
IN OTHER WORDS:
MAXIM epilogues are empirical.
CHREIA epilogues are systematically and analytically taught.
Our REASON for dividing the work into two different approaches:1. many students are marvelous imitators just by inspection. They see something and imitate it subconsciously. In fact much of what we speak and write we have not analyzed but we have internalized patterns and styles all the same, and we spout them regularly
2. there was WAY too much material to cover for the Maxim book (you should have seen the first edition, it was enormous!!), so we bumped all the non-empirical stuff into CHREIA to make Maxim doable in one year.
3. It was Tracy's idea. (I am not kidding.) But I think it's a good one. The only side effect is that moms sometimes email me like you just have, saying that they are not sure their kids' paragraphs are up to snuff. Well probably they are not, but that is okay, they will be with time.
SOOOOOO... finally.... ending this up... if I can ever quit.... you read the examples of epilogue in the book, write a few simple concluding sentences and leave it at that for now.
It is perfectly okay, for now (not for always) for your student to write, "From what we see above it is plain to see how wise Alexander was when he uttered those famous words about his friends being his treasures."
Breathe easily in knowing that in Chreia and in Herodotus (which follows Chreia), epilogue/conclusion, its structure, how to write a whiz bang good one is covered in many many lessons in more detail than most want to know.
Chreia is finishing its BETA testing right now and should be out in its final form with the student guide by the end of summer or sooner. Kathy and I are putting the final touches on it this month.
Herodotus is ALPHA testing right now, will be out by this fall with its student guide in BETA testing form (reduced pricing and promise of discount on the final form for those who want it).
Now, that was a wonderful dodging of your request for more epilogues. If you want more conclusions from different writings here and there, let me suggest
www.famousquotes.me.uk/speeches/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speechesBasically, read the endings of 'stuff', the Gettysburg Address and such, the endings of anything in Maxim, and look at how it's concluded for more empirical feels for how to conclude something.
And then if she doesn't write anything that just blows you away, relax. She will, with time and with feel. She will get that over time.
Does that help? If not, write again,
Lene