In this video I'd like to talk about transitions between paragraphs. So the
idea is that as you conclude a paragraph and start a new one you want to make
sure that you have an adequate and clear transition that shows the reader how you
get from point A to point B. The trouble is that when you start a new
paragraph you need to show not only where you came from but also where
you're going. And that's probably the most difficult part of this. So if you
get an essay back from an instructor and you see that kind of arrow and a
question mark beside it, or the words "no transition" written in the
margins, then you know that you have failed to make an adequate connection. In
this mini-essay what I've done here is I've compared a couple of poems
and I want to show you how we can make this better, because there's some
problems yet with what has been written here. The two poems are John McCrae's "In
Flanders Fields" and Wilfred Owen's poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth." And the thesis
statement right now is arguing that the one commemorates the bravery of the dead
and the other one suggests that no language or ceremony can adequately
capture the tragedy of war. So that's our thesis statement then at the end of our
first paragraph. Our next paragraph is going to look at just one of these poems.
We have to start somewhere after all. And it's going to make some kind of argument
about it that both ties back to the thesis and also kind of summarizes what
this whole paragraph is about. We say here then John McCrae's "In Flanders
Fields" commemorates the heroism of fallen soldiers but also functions as
propaganda for the war effort. It's quite a nice topic sentence but there are a
couple of problems with it. For one it repeats some of the language of the
introduction, and we want to avoid sounding repetitive. So the word
commemorates is in both of these sentences and that's a bit unfortunate.
But more broadly there's also a problem with scope. The scope of this topic
sentence is actually larger than what the thesis statement says. So the thesis
statement says that we're going to talk about the commemoration of the dead but
this introduces the topic of propaganda, and what I would do here is I would say
the thesis has to be broader than the topic sentence so we need to
take propaganda and copy it at least and also make sure we have it in the thesis
statement. If it is in the thesis statement then obviously this whole
sentence is going to be very repetitive and what that suggests is that we might
actually be able to kind of assume that the reader remembers what we're talking
about and we might jump into the poem a little bit more quickly and get to our
specific analysis. So that's one thing to keep in mind but the big thing here is
that we want to make sure that we harken back to what came before
without repeating ourselves too much and then also indicating what we're going to
talk about. Let's go next to the end of the first paragraph and see what we can
do here that can be better. Right now the final sentence here reads,
"In the next paragraph we will see a different perspective on war." One
thing you should never do is [to] forecast what's coming. Just delete
the sentence -- get rid of it. It's not necessary to say this is what we're
going to talk about next. Okay, the previous sentence to this reads, "John
McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' is therefore not only a haunting
description of the effects of war, but it also constitutes a kind of propaganda.
You can see there that ... we have tried to
summarize everything we've said. That's fine up to a point, but in a short
essay you can usually rely on your reader to to get your idea and you don't
have to keep summarizing at the end of every paragraph what you've just argued.
So summarize if it's not entirely clear or you want to draw a conclusion
that goes a little bit further, but don't just repetitively and and annoyingly
summarize everything you've already said. In fact the previous sentence is
actually much better as a conclusion. This one says "It is not surprising then
that McCrae's poem is used as a recruitment tool during World War I."
If we are recruiting then that's probably some form of propaganda and so
this goes back to our thesis statement, which we have adjusted,
without repeating it. We haven't used the word "propaganda" but it's clear that the
intent or the meaning here is quite similar, and you can end your paragraph
then at that point and scratch the final two sentences. Let's go on to the next
paragraph here. So this one reads, "Wilfred Owen's poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth'
states that all acts of remembrance are mockeries." You can probably see the
trouble here. This is a good sentence in general, and it describes the poem, but it
says nothing about how it relates to the previous paragraph. So we really need to
make sure that we indicate how this poem now is similar or different from what
came before. And it's very simple just to add a little transitional expression --
something like "by contrast, this poem states," and then we
can clearly see that we are continuing and doing something different in this
case. So the paragraph continues and it gives
some examples of how this poem shows that there is no adequate remembrance
for these soldiers. And then at the end of this paragraph we have these
lines about the contrast then between the poems. If you find that this
contrast is something you need to elaborate on at length, then it's
probably a good idea to start a separate paragraph talking about that, but in this
case we have, "The contrast with McCrae's couldn't be sharper: McCrae tells us to
take up the quarrel and hold the torch high."; Owen ends with dusk and the closing
of blinds. McCrae ends with light; Owen ends with darkness." If we want it to be a
bit more affirmative at the end we could add something like "thus"
or indeed -- some affirmative word that says, "Hey, look, now we're
concluding!" And I think that might make it a little bit more conclusive. But what
I do like about this ending is that it's very specific. There's a nice contrast
here but we're letting the specifics of the contrast do the concluding. And
that's often an example of effective writing. What you're trying to do
is you're trying to make sure that the example
also shows the larger argument, and if you can do that repeatedly then it's
often not necessary to spell out how this ties into what came before. A
couple more points here. Let's just go back here briefly to the beginning of
this paragraph. Notice the quotation in the first topic sentence here. So we have
"mockeries" and I would really suggest that you quote very sparingly in any
topic sentence. It's okay to have a little quotation but you need to make
sure that your argument comes through clearly. The key then is to make sure
that you don't let other people kind of speak for you. So just make sure
that you keep your topic sentence on the whole free from quotations. Then we have
this ending, or some kind of beginning of an ending, and one thing to watch out for
here (you know what, I'll just stick it on the next page here for clarity, so let's
go down) ... one thing to watch out for with this ending is that you don't repeat too
much of what came before, especially in a short essay and you want to watch out
for these kinds of general sentences that simply say very broadly that we
have seen something. "We have seen therefore that the two poems have a
different message." Why not say specifically what that message is.
That would be much more direct. But also do we need to summarize it in quite this
elaborate, cumbersome way? Because as you can see here, then, a lot
of the material that follows is going to be repetitive. One creative way to kind
of rephrase this is to ask a follow-up question. You could say something like
which poem is then more truthful in its representation of war? And if we
still have a question coming out of this then we're still interested in what the
conclusion is going to offer. There are lots of other strategies as well but I
would really suggest that when you transition to your conclusion that you
avoid just kind of boringly repeating everything that you have said. The real
thing to take away from this video then is that what you want your transitions
to do is you want them to obviously point to what came before and what's
coming up next, but you want them to be invisible. You want the flow to be so
natural and effective that the reader doesn't even notice that there is in a
sense a transition. One point is logically connected to the previous one.