Expository Essay Transition Words Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

That's why we have been in business so long with many happy customers to show for it. If you want our help today, just register with us online and then fill in the order form. In no time at all, one of our writers with an advanced degree in your essay's topic will begin to craft you a superbly written academic paper. Take that initial first step with our services at today and you'll be pleased with the results! in this crazy, mixed up world of ours, transitions glue our ideas and our essays together. This handout will introduce you to some useful transitional expressions and help you employ them effectively. In both academic 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 you 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 you present to them. Whether single words, quick phrases, or full sentences, they function as signs that tell readers how to think about, organize, and react to old and new ideas as they read through what you have written. Transitions signal relationships between ideas relationships such as: another example coming up stay alert! or here’s 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 not just verbal decorations that embellish your paper by making it sound or read better. They are words with particular meanings that tell the reader to think and react in a particular way to your ideas. In providing the reader with these important cues, transitions help readers understand the logic of how your ideas fit together. 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, abrupt, 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 thought.

You tend to write the way you think and your brain often jumps from one idea to another pretty quickly. You are working on a group paper the draft you are working on was created by pasting pieces of several people’s writing together. Since the clarity and effectiveness of your transitions will depend greatly on how well you have organized your paper, you may want to evaluate your paper’s 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 analysis as a whole. This exercise should help you to see the order of and connection between your ideas more clearly.

If after doing this exercise you find that you still have difficulty linking your ideas together in a coherent fashion, your problem may not be with transitions but with organization. For help in this area and a more thorough explanation of the reverse outlining technique described in the previous paragraph , please see the writing center’s handout on organization. The organization of your written work includes two elements: 1 the order in which you have chosen to present the different parts of your discussion or argument, and 2 the relationships you construct between these parts. Transitions cannot substitute for good 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 government after having been a dictatorship for many years.

Assume that you want to argue that el pais is not as democratic as the conventional view would have us believe. One way to effectively organize your argument would be to present the conventional view and then to provide the reader with your critical response to this view. So, in paragraph a you would enumerate all the reasons that someone might consider el pais highly democratic, while in paragraph b you would refute these points. The transition that would establish the logical connection between these two key elements of your argument would indicate to the reader that the information 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 manner: paragraph a: points that support the view that el pais’s new government is very democratic. transition: despite the previous arguments, there are many reasons to think that el pais’s new government is not as democratic as typically believed. paragraph b: points that contradict the view that el pais’s new government 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’s democracy as suspect.