To shift gears in a car, you need to press down on the clutch. To go from room to room, you walk through a doorway. To travel from floor to floor, you take the stairs.
To get from one place to another, you need a phase of transition. And writing is no different.
Transitions—between ideas, paragraphs, or even sentences—can be easy to overlook no matter what level the writer is working at. Although writers must use their judgement to determine what places need transitions, as a general rule, every topic sentence should contain a transition. And I’m not talking about “next” or “in addition;” these are transition training wheels. Let’s get less formulaic.
Once students get to Levels 3 and 4, I expect to see a look back and a look forward in each topic sentence. The look back is the transition. It tells us where we came from, setting up readers to understand the relationship between the previous idea and our new idea. The look forward shows what we’re going to talk about next.
For example, in an essay on the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon, we might open a paragraph by writing, “Just as the A-level maths exam serves as a symbol of stability in Christopher’s shifting world, Christopher’s system of counting yellow and red cars every morning gives him another measure of control.” The first half of the sentence looks back at the previous paragraph, which must have been about the A-level maths exam creating stability. While the topic sentence doesn’t start with a classic “also” phrase, it has a strong transition. The sentence establishes the relationship between where we’ve been and where we’re going. It looks backwards and forwards.
As writers, we operate with the assumption that we have some pretty smart readers—but that doesn’t mean they’ll always make the same leaps in logic. We writers must make connections between ideas clear and explicit.
Transitions show how you got to where you are!
Remember: look back and look forward in each topic sentence and you will seamlessly HOOK your readers! They will thank you for it!