If your Introduction can function as a Conclusion, isn't it redundant to write anything in the Conclusion beside "refer to the Introduction"?

Question

1. In the example below, I would state the Conclusion just once, at the beginning. I pick the sentence under Section 5 because it's more detailed than the sentence under Section 1. I find the second conclusion in CREAC superfluous. Why not just do CREA?

2. Even if you need CREAC, and the second conclusion, to signal the reader that you're concluding, why not just write a curt sentence asking the reader to refer to the conclusion at the beginning ("Please refer to the beginning or page whatever)? Isn't it pointless and stupid to paraphrase your Introduction?

      This chapter will explain one organizational paradigm, CREAC, and how it is used to express different forms of legal analysis, including analogical reasoning and rule-based reasoning. CREAC has five component parts, each building on the other. Each letter in CREAC represents a specific component part of the written expression of legal analysis: Conclusion, Rule, Explanation of the law, Application of the Law, and Conclusion. When drafted effectively, the parts combine in a cohesive, logical, and comprehensive expression of legal analysis. CREAC is a flexible paradigm that can be manipulated or translated to fit many different types of legal analyses or documents. The key is to understand how each component part of CREAC fits together.

Romantz. Legal Analysis: The Fundamental Skill (2009). p 120.

Answer 1

Both the introduction and conclusion are, in part, summarising the paper — but they’re doing in different contexts, and in different purposes. So there’s some overlap, but they’re not the same.

The introduction is written for readers who haven’t read the rest of the paper yet, and may never do so. So it needs to say what the main results are — to motivate some readers to read the whole paper, and to stick in the memory of others in case they have reason to come back to the paper in future. But it needs to do this in an accessible and self-contained way, not relying on technical background beyond what’s standard in the field. It also needs to orient readers for the rest of the paper — at least in my field (pure maths), it’s common for the introduction to include a quick outline of the other sections.

The conclusion is written for readers who have already read the rest of the paper, or at least skimmed it, and who are already motivated to care about the results, and may be intending to apply them in their own work. So it should summarise the results again, but can include more technical details (introduced and backed up by the body of the paper), and can look back and discuss what has been said in the body of the paper.

Answer 2

You've almost managed to answer yourself - you have a 'conclusion' at the beginning and a different conclusion at the end. Their defining difference is the fact that one is given before the bulk of the information and one afterwards.

Think of it the other way round; what if you took the conclusion from the end and stuck it on the beginning as an introduction? Or skipped the introduction and just put 'refer to the conclusion' ?
Nobody does this, because the purpose of an introduction is to explain roughly what points will be made in the piece - this is primarily so that a reader can determine from the first few sentences whether the piece is relevant to whatever they're researching.

The conclusion at the end is fundamentally different in that supporting evidence will have been given during the piece, and therefore a reader (assuming they have read through the piece) will be much better informed. This allows the conclusion at the end to be more detailed and use / refer to specific facts, principles or jargon in order to fill out and prove the point (Obviously only where those facts or jargon have been explained in the body of the piece). Putting those more complex details into an introduction would be bad because it would hinder the introduction in its job of showing the reader briefly what the piece is about.

Answer 3

All the material between the introduction and conclusion should be informing and/or persuading the reader in some way, which means that by the time they reach the conclusion, you should be able to tell them something that wouldn't have been meaningful, or wouldn't have been convincing, at the beginning. If the best an article can do for a conclusion is to restate the introduction, then the main body hasn't done its job at all.

It doesn't help that many students learning the mechanics of writing are taught to write essays in this format on completely trivial subjects, in which the introduction and conclusion really could be the same, because the content is so inconsequential. They have their reasons for doing this (requiring students to come up with an actually interesting thesis would be a distraction), but it can lead to some bad habits and some confusion as well.