2. How Can You Recognize a Transition in a Paragraph?
What this handout is almost
In this crazy, mixed-upward world of ours, transitions glue our ideas and our essays together. This handout will innovate you to some useful transitional expressions and help yous employ them finer.
The office and importance of transitions
In both bookish writing and professional writing, your goal is to convey information clearly and concisely, if not to convert the reader to your way of thinking. Transitions help yous to achieve these goals by establishing logical connections between sentences, paragraphs, and sections of your papers. In other words, transitions tell readers what to do with the information yous nowadays to them. Whether single words, quick phrases, or full sentences, they function as signs that tell readers how to recollect virtually, organize, and react to sometime and new ideas equally they read through what you have written.
Transitions signal relationships between ideas—relationships such as: "Another example coming up—stay warning!" or "Hither'southward an exception to my previous statement" or "Although this idea appears to be true, here's the real story." Basically, transitions provide the reader with directions for how to piece together your ideas into a logically coherent argument. Transitions are non just exact decorations that embellish your newspaper by making information technology audio or read better. They are words with detail meanings that tell the reader to recollect and react in a particular way to your ideas. In providing the reader with these important cues, transitions aid readers sympathise the logic of how your ideas fit together.
Signs that you might need to work on your transitions
How can you tell whether you need to work on your transitions? Here are some possible clues:
- Your instructor has written comments like "choppy," "jumpy," "precipitous," "flow," "need signposts," or "how is this related?" on your papers.
- Your readers (instructors, friends, or classmates) tell you that they had trouble following your organization or train of idea.
- You lot tend to write the way y'all think—and your brain often jumps from ane thought to another pretty apace.
- Y'all wrote your paper in several discrete "chunks" and so pasted them together.
- You are working on a group paper; the draft you are working on was created by pasting pieces of several people's writing together.
Organization
Since the clarity and effectiveness of your transitions will depend greatly on how well you take organized your paper, y'all may desire to evaluate your paper'southward organization before you work on transitions. In the margins of your draft, summarize in a word or short phrase what each paragraph is about or how it fits into your assay equally a whole. This exercise should help you to see the order of and connection between your ideas more clearly.
If after doing this practise you find that you lot still have difficulty linking your ideas together in a coherent fashion, your problem may non be with transitions but with organization. For help in this expanse (and a more than thorough explanation of the "reverse outlining" technique described in the previous paragraph), please see the Writing Heart's handout on organization.
How transitions work
The organization of your written work includes two elements: (one) the lodge in which yous take chosen to present the different parts of your discussion or argument, and (2) the relationships you construct between these parts. Transitions cannot substitute for practiced organization, but they can make your organization clearer and easier to follow. Take a look at the following example:
El Pais, a Latin American country, has a new democratic authorities afterward having been a dictatorship for many years. Presume that yous desire to fence that El Pais is not as autonomous as the conventional view would have us believe.
I fashion to effectively organize your statement would be to present the conventional view and and then to provide the reader with your critical response to this view. And then, in Paragraph A you would enumerate all the reasons that someone might consider El Pais highly democratic, while in Paragraph B yous would refute these points. The transition that would establish the logical connection betwixt these two primal elements of your argument would betoken to the reader that the data in paragraph B contradicts the information in paragraph A. As a result, you might organize your argument, including the transition that links paragraph A with paragraph B, in the following style:
Paragraph A: points that back up the view that El Pais's new regime is very democratic.
Transition: Despite the previous arguments, at that place are many reasons to remember that El Pais's new regime is not as democratic equally typically believed.
Paragraph B: points that contradict the view that El Pais'south new regime is very democratic.
In this case, the transition words "Despite the previous arguments," suggest that the reader should not believe paragraph A and instead should consider the writer's reasons for viewing El Pais'southward democracy as suspect.
As the instance suggests, transitions can help reinforce the underlying logic of your paper's organisation by providing the reader with essential data regarding the relationship between your ideas. In this way, transitions act as the glue that binds the components of your statement or word into a unified, coherent, and persuasive whole.
Types of transitions
Now that you take a general idea of how to go well-nigh developing effective transitions in your writing, let united states of america briefly discuss the types of transitions your writing will utilize.
The types of transitions bachelor to you are equally diverse every bit the circumstances in which y'all demand to use them. A transition tin be a single discussion, a phrase, a sentence, or an entire paragraph. In each case, it functions the same way: Get-go, the transition either directly summarizes the content of a preceding judgement, paragraph, or department or implies such a summary (by reminding the reader of what has come before). Then, it helps the reader anticipate or comprehend the new information that yous wish to nowadays.
- Transitions between sections: Particularly in longer works, it may exist necessary to include transitional paragraphs that summarize for the reader the information just covered and specify the relevance of this information to the discussion in the following department.
- Transitions between paragraphs: If you lot have done a good job of arranging paragraphs so that the content of one leads logically to the next, the transition volition highlight a relationship that already exists by summarizing the previous paragraph and suggesting something of the content of the paragraph that follows. A transition between paragraphs can be a give-and-take or two (even so, for example, similarly), a phrase, or a sentence. Transitions tin be at the end of the first paragraph, at the beginning of the second paragraph, or in both places.
- Transitions within paragraphs: Every bit with transitions between sections and paragraphs, transitions within paragraphs deed as cues by helping readers to anticipate what is coming before they read it. Within paragraphs, transitions tend to exist single words or short phrases.
Transitional expressions
Effectively amalgam each transition frequently depends upon your ability to identify words or phrases that will indicate for the reader the kind of logical relationships you lot want to convey. The table below should go far easier for you to notice these words or phrases. Whenever you lot have trouble finding a give-and-take, phrase, or sentence to serve as an effective transition, refer to the information in the tabular array for assistance. Wait in the left column of the tabular array for the kind of logical human relationship you are trying to express. And then expect in the right column of the table for examples of words or phrases that limited this logical relationship.
Keep in mind that each of these words or phrases may have a slightly unlike pregnant. Consult a lexicon or author'due south handbook if you are unsure of the exact meaning of a give-and-take or phrase.
| LOGICAL Relationship | TRANSITIONAL EXPRESSION |
| Similarity | likewise, in the same way, just as … then too, as well, similarly |
| Exception/Dissimilarity | but, however, in spite of, on the i hand … on the other manus, nevertheless, nonetheless, notwithstanding, in dissimilarity, on the contrary, still, yet |
| Sequence/Order | offset, second, 3rd, … next, then, finally |
| Time | after, afterward, at last, earlier, currently, during, before, immediately, later, meanwhile, now, recently, simultaneously, later on, then |
| Example | for instance, for instance, namely, specifically, to illustrate |
| Accent | fifty-fifty, indeed, in fact, of class, truly |
| Identify/Position | above, adjacent, below, beyond, hither, in front, in dorsum, nearby, there |
| Cause and Effect | accordingly, consequently, hence, and then, therefore, thus |
| Additional Support or Evidence | additionally, once again, also, and, as well, besides, as important, further, furthermore, in addition, moreover, then |
| Decision/Summary | finally, in a word, in cursory, briefly, in conclusion, in the end, in the last assay, on the whole, thus, to conclude, to summarize, in sum, to sum upwards, in summary |
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Source: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/transitions/
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