Wrap up

To 'wrap up' is to finish something successfully

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Wrap up

“Wrap up.”

Wrap up is a phrasal verb that means, “to finish something successfully.”

You use “wrap up” with a process, something that takes a bit of time. And you usually say it when you choose to end the process because you have achieved your objectives —not because time ran out , but you finish it because it’s a success.

Wrap up a meeting

This is a very common phrasal verb to use at work. So let’s imagine you’re in a meeting. The objective of the meeting was to discuss the candidates for a new job. After an hour, you’ve had a good discussion , but you don’t have a decision yet. You can say, “we need to wrap up here, so let’s make a final decision.” That means, “we need to finish this meeting successfully , so let’s make our decision.”

Now let’s imagine you’re giving a training seminar . The seminar is scheduled to last all day—until 5:00 in the afternoon. But you—you’re the teacher—you realize that the people in the class already know a lot of what you’re teaching. So it doesn’t take as long as you thought it would.

Here’s what you can say: “We wrapped up at 3:00 because everyone knew so much about the topic.”

“We wrapped up at 3:00” means, we finished the training seminar successfully at 3:00.

Wrap up the day

Many Americans work in an office where the end of the workday is not strictly defined . All offices have their own cultures. But in my experience, not everyone stands up and leaves at exactly the same time every single day. Each person can decide when to wrap up for the day.

If you got in at 7:00 and had an amazing day, you got a lot done without any interruptions —you may decide to wrap up at 3:30 or 4:00. That’s a good day. You got a lot done and you left early. Good job.

But now picture a different kind of day. Imagine you got in late, at 9:30, and imagine that during the day you got distracted , you spent some time chit-chatting , you engaged in some pointless email debates .

All of a sudden , it’s 4:30—you still haven’t gotten a lot done. You might not wrap up until 8:00 that night. You might not finish your workday successfully until 8:00.

So when we use “wrap up,” we indicate when we finished what we needed to do. We wrap up the meeting when we’ve made the decision we needed to make. We wrap up the training seminar when we’ve covered all the material we needed to cover. We wrap up a workday when we’ve finished a good, full day’s worth of work in that day.

Wrap up a task or project

You can use “wrap up” with things that are less associated with a time, too. When you “wrap up” a project, you finish it successfully. I used to work in consulting , so we did a lot of projects for our clients. That’s what consulting is. And I often was working on two or three or four projects at once .

Here’s something that happened to me a lot. I would get like 95 percent of the way through one project. Everyone was happy. And then my attention would drift to the next project coming in the door. And my boss would tell me, “Jeff, can we please wrap up that old project?” That means, can we get that last 5 percent done, successfully? Can we wrap it up? Can we please finish it successfully?

I’ve been on the other side of that conversation, too. I’ve hired consultants and contractors to help me here in Plain English. And sometimes they do a great job, but the last couple of tasks just seem to take forever . And so sometimes I say to them, “Let’s wrap this up by the end of the week.” That means, “let’s finish this task or let’s finish this project successfully by the end of the week.”

See you next time!

What happens right about now? Every Monday and Thursday, right around this same time, we wrap up another audio episode of Plain English.

We finish it successfully. I finish recording it; you finish listening. It’s a good, successful job all around.

But if you’re not ready to wrap up just yet, if you don’t want the experience to end, if you want to do more with what you’ve learned today on this episode, then you can of course do that at PlainEnglish.com/704.

That’s where you’ll find the transcripts, translations , quizzes, exercises, and practice areas . PlainEnglish.com/704.

We’ll be back with a new episode on Thursday. Coming up on Thursday: it’s a big question that most Americans will face at one point in their lives . The question is, “buy or rent?” We’ll walk through the dynamics of that question on Thursday.

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Story: Lesson