is this title supposed to act like a transition?

If it is, I think mine just failed. Anyway, I have to say that I was really excited about some of the ideas that Murphy presented in his “Teaching ‘Organization’” essay. In particular, I was struck by the idea that transitions are the “connective tissue” or “the moments when ideas are named and when the often complicated relationships between those ideas, still submerged for many writers working on early drafts, finally require articulation” (275). Thus, transitions become so much more than helping your reader along while they are reading your paper; they are the key moments when you take a broader perspective to articulate the general shape of your argument. It helped remind me how central organization is to writing—great ideas can look really bad without the necessary structure, and certainly when making an argument, the way in which ideas are presented can be very persuasive. But, what I wanted to ask Murphy was how we get students to see the importance of connecting and understanding their ideas through transitions. I did like that he talked about using the word “moments” instead of “sentences.” I know that in the Writing Lab some people get stuck thinking they can only have one transition/topic sentence when sometimes their ideas are more complex and therefore need more than one sentence to articulate. When I am tying to get students to think about organization and transitions in the Writing Lab, I usually tell them that my method is to look at the two paragraphs and ask themselves how are they the same and how they are different. For example, does the second paragraph contrast with the previous one, offer another example, offer a deeper perspective, etc. But, I guess this essay made me question if even that is enough. I’d like to open up discussion to hear how others talk about transitions and get students to think about them because as of now, I think my use of them is still too limited and perfunctory.