Using Transitions to Improve Your Writing (and Your Grades!)

Transitions are words and phrases that create logical connections within an essay. They ease the introduction of new ideas by preparing the reader to hear those ideas and by connecting them to what the reader has already learned from the essay. They help to create a sense of "logical flow," keeping the reader oriented and moving steadily forward through the work.

For these reasons, good use of transitions can often be the difference between a "very good" essay and an "excellent" one -- in other words, between a B and and A.

I recommend the following web pages to help you with transitions:

The UNC Writing Center: Transitions
This page provides a good general introduction to using transitions, including examples and a list of transitional words and phrases.

Capital Community College's Guide to Grammar & Writing: Coherence - Transitions Between Ideas
In addition to providing a brief introduction to transitions, this page is useful for its emphasis on "Repetition of Words and Phrases" and "Parallelism" as tools for creating logical connections.

Persuasive Paragraphs Example

Here is a link to the model paragraph we looked at during today's class; although this paragraph is about a short story, it would be a suitable model for the body paragraphs of any college-level persuasive essay.

In class, we outlined the paragraph, noting how the main claim is broken down into smaller, more specific ideas with textual support and new perspectives or ideas at each turn. The following outline is based on our collaborative work in class:

I. Major Claim: Miss Brill's Sunday visits to the park help her to cope with loneliness

A. She enjoys these outings

B. Her time at the park gets her out of her apartment

C. Her time at the park provides her with company

1. Listening to other people makes her feel included in their lives

2. She notices other people, and feels that they might notice her

E. These visits to the park give her a sense of imagined community, even family

F. For these reasons, her trips to the park allow her to escape the isolation of her life

For the sake of brevity and focus, I have left off the transitional sentence at the end of the paragraph--however, the transition is an important part of the paragraph and not to be neglected.

This model paragraph comes from the web site of Randy Rambo, an instructor at another college. You can find Mr. Rambo's remarks on paragraph organization here; the main page of his site also lists a number of other composition-related topics that you may find useful.

Sample Persuasive Essays

Here are a series of sample persuasive essays that may provide useful models for your work in ENG101. Both of these samples are taken from Randy Rambo's excellent ENG1001 web site.

1. John J. Hinklemeyer, "The Failure of Abstinence-Only Programs." Hinklemeyer's essay is a persuasive argument that uses independent research to argue that abstinence-only sex education classes have left American students poorly informed about sex and vulnerable to teen pregnancy and disease. As the instructor notes, this is not a perfect essay, but it does provide an excellent model. Note the strong thesis, complex organization, and the expert handling of quotations.

2. Jamie Fast, "The End of an Illusion." Fast's essay argues for a specific interpretation of Jane Mansfield's short story "Miss Brill." Note the strong thesis and complex organization of the essay; note too that Fast's paragraphs take large claims and break them down into smaller units, which makes this a good model for paragraph development as well. You can click on the bracketed numbers in the piece to read her professor's comments on why this is a strong essay.

Composition Resources

This is a link to the "Thesis, Organization, Development" section of Randy Rambo's composition web pages. This section includes the two pages we looked at yesterday in class: Organizing and Developing Persuasive Paragraphs, which gives an 'x-ray' of a persuasive paragraph, and Example of a Persuasive Paragraph, which takes a complex paragraph from a student paper and breaks it down into its component parts. Along these lines, I also recommend Bad Paragraph/Good Paragraph, which provides contrasting examples of a "bad" (under-developed and poorly organized) paragraph and a good (well-developed and tightly organized) paragraph, and discusses each one in detail.

The "Thesis, Organization, Development" page includes many other topics that apply directly to your work for this class, including The Thesis Statement and Creating an Outline for an Essay.

On the left hand side of the "Thesis, Organization, Development" page, you'll find links to other sections on the writing process, grammar, and style.

MLA Citation

The college library provides a useful online guide to MLA Citation: look closely and you'll find links on in-text citation and sample papers at the top of the page. For the "Works Cited" page, I recommend that you use Easybib.com, which automatically generates bibliographic entries in MLA format (and other formats too) based on the information you provide.

Grades + Feedback

By now, everyone should have received feedback on Response #1. It may be worth making a few comments about that feedback here.

This round of feedback includes a series of written comments that address each stage of the assignment (response to reading + field work) from a compositional perspective, considering topics such as organization, development, and the use of outside sources or experiential evidence. I've provided fairly extensive written feedback this time because this is the first graded assignment.

Following my comments, I've given a list of the compositional and the sentence-level issues I noted in the work. One example is listed for each sentence-level issue (usually the first one) but you should keep in mind that the same issue may occur several times in the piece. My advice for working through sentence-level issues (and therefore avoiding them on the next assignment) is to take printed copies of your assignment and my feedback to the Writing Center in E-111.

A few of you will discover that I've given you specific instructions for using the Writing Center, such as "I want you to visit the Writing Center *once per week* this semester." As I said in class, it's been my experience that students who follow these instructions show dramatic improvement in their work (and therefore in their grades!) over the course of the semester.

The grade for this assignment is shown at the bottom of the page. As it states on the syllabus, responses cannot be rewritten; however, all of your response papers for the semester will be averaged together (along with the overall grade for your blog) to account for 30% of your course grade. If you're concerned about your grade on this assignment, the best thing to do is to work out the issues I've noted in my feedback so that you can get a higher grade next time.

Logical Fallacies

The web site that Dr. Rizzieri presented during this weeks LIB110 can be found here. It defines and provides examples for a great number of logical fallacies (errors in reasoning) that frequently occur in advertising and in writing. They even show up in student papers! so it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the most common ones, such as "Appeal to Authority," "Post Hoc," and "Appeal to Tradition."

Blog Check + Notes on Titles

I've set up a list of blogs from the "Ethics of Food" cluster to the lower right. The list is sorted so that the most recently updated blogs will always float to the top. Each entry lists the title of the blog, the title of the most recent post, and the time of that post relative to the present (for example, "7 hours ago"). If you don't see your blog in the list, that means I do not have the address of your blog, and no one in the class can read it right now. If you see the title of your blog, but not the title of your most recent post or the time of that post, that means you haven't posted anything yet! In either case, you've missed the due date of your first homework since both of these things were supposed to be done by midnight. Uh oh.

Now let's notice a few things:

1. Some of the blogs have titles that don't tell the reader anything about the theme of the blog. Remember, the title of a piece of writing has two jobs to do: first, to give the reader a sense of what to expect from the work, and second, to attract her attention so that she'll want to read your work. Because you're publishing your writing for this class in the real world, we're playing by real world rules: an ineffective title can mean the difference between someone choosing to click on your blog or going elsewhere. With this in mind, some of you may want to think about changing the title of your blog to something more effective and intriguing. (To change your title, click on "Customize" at the top of the page, then "Settings.") You can use any phrase that fits the theme of the course. Be creative!

2. Similarly, we need to work on giving our posts descriptive titles. Look at the titles of your classmates posts: Which of them sound interesting? Which of them are you likely to read when you give comments on Tuesday morning? By thinking about what makes these titles attractive, you can learn to title your own posts more effectively.

In both cases, we're dealing with titles. It's easy to ignore them or to lose sight of their purpose in a classroom situation, where among other things you learn to take it for granted that the teacher is always going to read your work. But in the real world, the title is one of the most important parts of a piece of writing. It can make or break you. If you think about your own reading habits, both online and in print, you'll probably see that this is true: Who wants to read a magazine article or a web page (or go see a movie or play a video game) with a boring or obscure title?

Let's make that our first big writing lesson: Work on your titles!