Artful transitions

Source: Wikimedia Commons public
domain photo (with text added by the author).

One time about ten years ago, I attended a professional development training session in which the Ph.D. presenting the seminar told a story about her dissertation advisor. Among his written comments on her dissertation draft was this cutting remark: “Your transitions, as I’m sure you realize, are artless.” Ouch. Now, ten years later and having read countless student essays, I can more fully appreciate what the dissertation advisor meant. Not all transitions are created equal.

We are all familiar with common transitional words like “first-second-last” and “furthermore-moreover-consequently.” There is nothing inherently wrong with these transitional words, but if you want your writing to transcend the pedestrian, then you will want to craft more artful transitions.

First off, transitions are essential for readers. If you envision your composition as a mountain range -- the Essay Mountains -- transitions are the bridges that allow a reader to traverse from peak to peak. Without these bridges, the hypothetical reader in the Essay Mountain Range will fall to his or her death. In your real essay, nothing so drastic will occur, but your real reader will notice the missing transition, pause, probably re-read the previous paragraph to see if he or she missed anything, and become confused. Then a real disaster will happen. Your reader will stop reading what you’ve written because it’s too hard to follow the path you’ve laid out.

One way to craft an effective transition is to momentarily bring the reader’s mind back to the topic of the preceding paragraph, and then project forward into the next paragraph. For example, let’s say you just finished writing a paragraph about women who disguised their gender to fight as soldiers in the Civil War (which sometimes occurred). Your next paragraph is about women serving in the modern army. Perhaps this is the first sentence of your new paragraph: “Unlike the Civil War, when women were forced to disguise their identities to serve on the front lines, today’s army allows and even encourages women to assume combat roles.” If you had jumped abruptly, without a transition, from the Civil War to today’s military, your reader would have become lost in momentary confusion.

In this essay about her decision not to take her husband’s name in marriage, Anna Quindlen uses artful transitions -- http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/04/garden/life-in-the-30-s.html

Read the essay, and identify the words and/or phrases that provide a transition between each paragraph. There are nine paragraphs.

Here is what I came up with:

1 → 2 : “Mrs. Krovatin?” → “story about a name”

2 → 3 : “political decision” → “personal and professional decision too”

3 → 4 : “personal and professional decision too” → “neither of these … reasons”

4 → 5 : “reasons” → “decision”

5 → 6 : “explanation” → “answer”

6 → 7 : “personal identity” → “identity”

7 → 8 : “decisions” → “alternative solutions”

8 → 9 : “No, this is Mr. Krovatin’s wife” → “When I decided”

Notice too how Quindlen stitches larger swatches of her essay together, not just paragraphs. Her answer “Yes” at the end of the first paragraph returns to our mind with “No, this is Mr. Krovatin’s wife” in the eighth, and the “umbrella of his identity” in the fourth paragraph returns with “my husband’s umbrella” in the ninth. She artfully weaves her essay together using these transitions as threads. I hope this example helps you. And now it’s time for me to transition to another writing topic!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.