Transitions

1. Transitions So that I know what you’re talking about…

2. Consider the following Being an American Teen means dealing with pressure. Friends can put pressure on you. Parents put pressure on you. Sports are hard and make you tired at the end of the day. Figuring out high school is complicated. Bullying is something that everyone deals with on a daily basis. I have personally dealt with bullying. It’s important to still stay true to yourself and not care what anyone thinks.

3. Signs you need to work on your transitions: • You get comments like “choppy,” “jumpy,” “abrupt,” “flow,” “need signposts,” or “how is this related?” on your papers. • Your readers 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 wrote your paper in several discrete “chunks” and then pasted them together.

4. *Purpose* • Transitions are like roadmaps that tell the reader where you’re going and how your ideas are related. • They are not decorative embellishments; they establish logical connections. • They provide cues to help your reader discern your arguments.

5. *Where are they?* • Between sentences to show the relationships between the ideas you have in your paragraphs. • Between paragraphs to show where you are going next and what the reader can expect. • Between sections if you are writing a longer piece that is making several arguments and synthesizing them.

6. *A Word on Organization* • This works in two ways: • The order in which you present information • The relationships you construct between the information • The way you arrange your information adds to the argument you are making.

7. A Word on Organization • Effective transitions can’t mitigate a poorly organized paper. • *Try this: • Go through your rough draft and in the margin to the left, identify the subject or idea of the paragraph. • Then look back and decide if the order of your paragraphs based on their subjects makes sense. • Is it sequential? Do they flow in a logical progression? • If not, move them around.

8. Sentence Transitions • Even the ideas within your paragraphs need transitions to show how the ideas relate to each other. “Sources are now confirming that no words in the human language can possibly describe how truly unimportant the next three hours at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles actually are. According to the world’s most prominent linguists, even strong words and phrases specifically designed to convey pointlessness, such as “meaningless,” “worthless,” and “void of anything even close to resembling actual significance,” drastically fail to capture how utterly inconsequential the event now airing live on national television is. In addition, reports indicate that the extraordinarily high level of inanity currently taking place on ABC right this very second cannot sufficiently be captured by simply saying, “This is dumb,” and changing the channel.”

9. *Helpful Transition Words*

10. *Transition Words Cont’d*

11. *Paragraph Transitions* • With effective organization, where the content of one paragraph leads logically to the next, transitions highlight existing relationships between the paragraphs. • They can be at the end of one paragraph, the beginning of the next, or in both places. • Essentially, they summarize what has already been said.

12. For Example… • Paragraph: Peer pressure/friendships • Transition: Friends are great to have but they can be a source of stress; similarly, family can be very supportive but also very demanding. • Paragraph: Family pressure/family

13. Another example… • Paragraph: Siddhartha did not allow himself to become physical with any woman but Kamala. • Transition: Siddhartha’s fidelity to Kamala shows his commitment to her and ultimately results in a child. • Paragraph: Kamala and Siddhartha both deeply love the child they had together, possibly because it connects them to each other.

14. Another example… • Paragraph: “The Simpsons” takes a stance on many social issues while still recognizing both sides of said issue. • While some cartoon shows are intelligent and thoughtful, others boil down to unoriginal toilet humor. • Paragraph: “Family Guy” rips “The Simpsons” off all the time and is generally a really stupid show.

15. Now consider this Being an American Teen means learning how to deal with pressures put on you by your friends, family, coaches, and teachers. It means figuring out a way to survive and still stay true to yourself. Sometimes the influence of outside forces make this harder to accomplish than it sounds. Bullying is a daily reality for many people. Some bullies single out those people that are different from them. This means that staying true to yourself puts you at risk if who you are is different than who everyone else is. For example, if you prefer to shave your head and tattoo hair on, then you make yourself susceptible to bullying.

16. In Conclusion • You all need to work on transitions in your next paper. • If you debate, these are your signposts. • If you don’t, these are signposts that show where you’re going. Because people aren’t psychic.