Making the Transition
I often find myself brushing aside the transition, which is the topic of this week's reading. I find that most transition sentences are put in merely because the student thinks she needs them to get an A, as opposed to the role that the comp teacher sees for them -- a little flag to say, "Hey! This thing is kind of like this other thing I was talking about!"
I think that Murphy's comparison of the two essays about psychology illuminates the problem with transitions: real life doesn't have them. On August 15 of last year, I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. On August 16, I was living in Columbia, Missouri. On October 16, I was 21, and on October 17, I was 22. Although there there was continuity in my life, there was no sentence using the word "furthermore" in between these phases. The choppiness of David Coffey's "Untitled" reflects this. He's not stringing these stories together with transitions because he's talking about real people, and to imply that they are linked together simply because he's chosen to write about all of them in the same essay would make it seem like he didn't understand their similarites outside of their common presence in the essay. But at the same time, his choosing to write about all of them shows that he understands that there is a commonality among them and through them and within them, which is more expertly articulated by his paragraphs of analysis.
The point here is that transitions seem inherently inorganic to the real world, and yet it's significant that writers make connections between information they encounter. So what's the balance? How do you make a transition a connection? How do you make it mean something besides just having it sit on a page as a rhetorical slight of hand?
I think that Murphy's comparison of the two essays about psychology illuminates the problem with transitions: real life doesn't have them. On August 15 of last year, I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. On August 16, I was living in Columbia, Missouri. On October 16, I was 21, and on October 17, I was 22. Although there there was continuity in my life, there was no sentence using the word "furthermore" in between these phases. The choppiness of David Coffey's "Untitled" reflects this. He's not stringing these stories together with transitions because he's talking about real people, and to imply that they are linked together simply because he's chosen to write about all of them in the same essay would make it seem like he didn't understand their similarites outside of their common presence in the essay. But at the same time, his choosing to write about all of them shows that he understands that there is a commonality among them and through them and within them, which is more expertly articulated by his paragraphs of analysis.
The point here is that transitions seem inherently inorganic to the real world, and yet it's significant that writers make connections between information they encounter. So what's the balance? How do you make a transition a connection? How do you make it mean something besides just having it sit on a page as a rhetorical slight of hand?
posted by Faith | 3:28 PM
1 Comments:
Sometimes writing is choppy. Each sentence is its own topic. Nothing seems to connect each sentence. We notice writing that lacks transitions and our students can too. For a long time, I would read someone's paper and say to myself, "Oh, this needs transitions," but I didn't know how to explain that to the writer. The best thing that I can do is show the class examples of passages or parts of papers that seem choppy, that lack transitions, and ask them to talk about what they notice. This can then give them a framework for seeing this choppiness in their own work. I don't know if this addresses what you were writing. I read about a quarter of the way through posts and then I can't wait until the end before I have to post. :)
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