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No matter how easy or difficult coming up with the content of an essay is, one topic still mystifies many across the board: the challenge of transitioning between seemingly different topics in a way that makes sense. As a result of this, many papers end up looking a little bit choppy, like this:
Many people’s favorite movie is The Notebook. An elderly man reads an elderly woman a story that she doesn’t remember is from her own diary due to dementia. It’s about how they fell in love when they were young.
Many problems can be found in this movie.
Notice how there isn’t really a clear connection between each of the sentences, and it’s a little difficult to follow the logic of this short passage. If your papers look anything like this, then don’t worry — this problem is easy to solve!
Transitions are just about showing the relationships between your ideas, and in doing so, helping your reader understand them as well. One method of implementing transitions is to follow the Given-New contract.
What is the Given-New Contract?
The Given-New contract refers to writing your paper in such a way that you refer to given information before you introduce new information. It isn’t quite as complicated in practice as it might sound.
Let’s look again at the previous example:
Many people’s favorite movie is The Notebook.
Because this is the beginning of the paper, it will start with new information; that is unavoidable. But now, if we were to transition to a new sentence, we would want to do so in the following way:
In this iconic film, an elderly man reads an old woman a story that she doesn’t remember is from her own diary.
Note the bolded words; these words serve as our transition, because they refer to the information we gave in the previous sentence (the film); these words are followed by new information.
Now if we were to do the whole passage, it would look something like this:
Many people’s favorite movie is The Notebook. In this iconic film, an elderly man reads an elderly woman a story that she doesn’t remember is from her own diary due to dementia. The story he tells her is about how they fell in love when they were young.
Many problems can be found in this movie.
Now this solves the problem of sentence-level transitions, but what about transitions between paragraphs?
These larger transitions can be a bit trickier, but the above example’s transition to a new paragraph can be solved at the bare minimum by adding a single word to display that the tone of the paper is about to go in a new direction:
However, many problems can be found in this movie.
This indicates that the author is about to disagree with or contradict the ideas they just stated. Other typical transition words and phrases to try are: nevertheless, therefore, as a result, additionally, on the contrary, and many others -- a quick google search should give you loads of these.
But if you wanted to go just a little bit further, we could take an extra step and apply our given-new contract in a larger way:
However, despite the film’s romantic plot and heartwarming themes, many problems can be found in this movie.
This is still, in a way, following the given-new contract. The first paragraph is all about the romantic plot of the movie, so in mentioning that, we are mentioning given information to our audience before transitioning to a new idea — that there are flaws.
Here is another example of the Given-New contract working on a sentence level, where the bolded information represents the reference to the “given”:
Capitalism and Socialism have had a large impact on the spending of the United States Government. Both of these ideas are implemented in very different but equally important ways.
One of the ideas the U.S. tries to stay away from is Fascism.
This last transition to a new paragraph may not seem like it’s referencing previously stated information, but in a way, it is; we are comparing what is about to be said (fascism) with what has already been said, and this, too, shows a relationship between ideas. And sometimes, that’s all that you need!
Happy writing!
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