In this video, I’m going to help you connect your thoughts in an essay.
A good essay will contain several different points, and you’ll need to transition between those in a way that leads your reader logically through your arguments.
Using Transitions
Let’s talk about why you should use transition words, phrases, or even sentences and paragraphs.
Clarity
First, it’s a mark of good writing. Transitions make written communication more understandable. We’ve all read (or written!) a jumbled mess of an article. There’s no “flow” of information. Paragraphs are disjointed (that is, not coherently connected). They don’t build on each other or follow a logical progression of ideas.
This makes it difficult to understand what the author is trying to communicate. In turn, that makes it less worthwhile to read. I’m assuming that you either want someone to read what you are writing, or you have a professor who’s required to read your writing, so you should write well!
Persuasion
Second, it’ll make your writing more persuasive. If you can show how your reasoning makes a coherent argument, and how one thought leads into another, you’re more likely to convince someone that what you’re arguing is true. And if you can’t do that, you may need to revise your argument.
Ways to Transition Well
One way to transition well is to think about how your ideas are connected. A few of the main types of transitions are additive, adversarial, causal, and sequential. If you have ideas that relate in a number of these ways, there’s probably a way to organize your paper that makes more sense. Perhaps two ideas happen in a certain order, and the third one adds on to the second one. Your transitions will probably come more easily if you organize your paper well.
Carefully constructing topic sentences will help you transition between paragraphs. A topic sentence introduces and describes what a paragraph will be about—they’re like miniature thesis statements. You can use the topic sentence to acknowledge the concluding sentence of the prior paragraph and lead into how the current paragraph expands upon, or perhaps refutes, earlier ideas.
You will want to use transitions between all thoughts, no matter how large or small. The amount of transition language needed will be commensurate (that is, proportional) to the size of the ideas. You may only need a single word to shift between two sentences, or you may need an entire page to move from one major idea to another. You may have already seen our video on transition words. If you haven’t, it may be helpful to check it out after you’ve finished this video.
That’s all for now! See you next time!
