As we write, it is important to establish strong transitions between individual ideas. The transition sentence is a bridge between what we just wrote about and what we are going to write about next.
Transitions are important for all of your assignments: journals, discussion boards, competencies, and essays alike. While many prompts are set up as lists of questions, it is always best to practice making cohesive paragraphs, rather than a separated list of answers. For more help with structuring your paragraphs and essays, click here to learn about the Written Feedback service.
*Note: the examples below use “I voice” as often, prewriting asks you questions directly. In most academic writing, however, personal pronouns like “I” and “we” will be replaced with third-person nouns. Click here to learn more.
Let’s start with this (abbreviated) example of a discussion prompt, which asks students to answer questions:
1. What do you think is the main point of your selected reading? What is the author trying to say?
2. A claim is a statement that captures an opinion on a topic. What is the author's claim? How do you know? Do you agree or disagree with it?
3. Based on your initial reactions to this piece, what original claim could you make about this reading and its author?
Your answers might look like this:
1. I think the main point of “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan was to express her love for her mother. She is trying to get her reader to think about how her mother was mistreated because she spoke broken English.
2. Tan says that it's wrong to mistreat immigrants based on their use or misuse of English, and I agree. She shows this when the stockbrokers treat her mother badly on the phone.
3. I might claim that Tan is probably biased about the treatment of her mother by Americans, but that she uses clear examples of how she was treated to support her points.
Notice that the response above is separated into answers to the prompt questions. Now you need to add transition sentences, which link these ideas together to create a cohesive piece. The transition sentences are italicized below, so you can clearly see them.
I think the main point of “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan is to express her love for her mother. She is trying to get her reader to think about how her mother was mistreated because she spoke broken English. She is also trying to tell us that that is wrong!
I agree with Tan that it is wrong to mistreat immigrants based on their use or misuse of English. She tells us how the stockbrokers treat her mother on page 22. By providing a specific example, Tan allows us to see this mistreatment for ourselves, proving that her claim is not based only on her emotional response, but on what happened to she and her mother.
Based on the stockbroker anecdote Tan shares, I might claim that Tan is probably biased about the treatment of her mother by Americans, but that she also uses clear examples of how she was treated to support her points.
Notice how the above version links ideas from each answer together, rather than clipped answers to separate questions. This is a great way to practice paragraphs before you get to the journal or essay stage in your writing over the weeks of a course.
You should apply transitions to anything you are writing. Consider the transition sentence and make new paragraphs each time your writing shifts in focus, flow, or function.
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