Make “Transition” Meaningful

Just as we ask students to edit their writing in order to make it more concise and precise, occasionally it behooves us as professional English teachers to review the language we have inherited and often enlarged.

Our notion of transition is one such concept.  Haziness about what it is has resulted in a category that has no relation to what the word means.  On the premise that precision is a virtue to practice and not only preach, I propose to chip away at the accretions to arrive at something simple and useful.

The verb originates in the Latin transire, to cross from one place to another, or to change places (Online OED).  Not to stay in one “place.”  Not to “connect” or “add” or “compare” or any of the encyclopedic list of functions listed by Purdue OWL.  Those constructions, in a less grammar-phobic age, used to be properly called adverbial clauses. No, transition means, simply to change, from one locus or place to another.

To its credit, Purdue OWL’s presentation early on admits that weaving key words from one paragraph into a subsequent one is an established method of connecting paragraphs.  (I call this “chain stitching;” see https://youtu.be/KP3q3H5bnf8 for an analogical demonstration.)  It is useful to know that writers of non-fiction don’t use transitions perhaps as often as we think.  However, I think the student who wrote the page lost track of what the word means, what the concept includes. (“However” is a transition, from approval to disapproval.)

The category, it seems to me, should include those words that move us from one subject or argument or viewpoint to another, if we are to be consistent with the word’s meaning.  That would embrace contradiction (nevertheless, however, although and its cousins, still, but and yet, on the other hand, and so on) and chronology (earlier, later, subsequently).

Moreover, we want to distinguish those adverbs that signal continuation or elaboration of arguments in process (moreover, indeed, furthermore, additionally) from those arguments we need to transition to.

Furthermore, I question the need for elaborate categorization—it becomes something else to learn, instead of something encountered through reading arguments and learned tacitly as well as through modeling.   Better to call them adverbs as a general class if we need to call them anything, if for no other reason than to keep our vocabulary a more useful model of clarity and precision.

We ask it of our students.  We should be prepared to respond in kind.

Similes Without "Like" or "As"

College freshmen—some of them, at least—can still remember that a simile is a comparison of one thing with another using “like” or “as.” 

Or is it?  What are we to make of this from William Least-Heat Moon in The Road to Quoz:

eastward to the Mississippi lay cotton fields and wetlands, so that for some miles the Ouachita was a kind of zipper between the old steamboating South and the cattleman's West.

Or this from Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House:

…Faruk pulled out a handkerchief the size of a sheet and was mopping his sweat

Or this from David Gessner’s All the Wild that Remains:

All the pretending and the myths were, to his eye, no more real than the false fronts of the towns in Hollywood westerns.

Just to provide a few.

Constructions like these are more frequent than you probably think.

They each offer comparisons without "like" or "as." They aren’t metaphors, because the language—“kind of,” “size of,” and “more real than” indicates comparison. Why are they not labeled similes?  Habit and laziness, in my estimation.

We are not used to questioning the definitions and assumptions of our childhood, it seems.  Yet we want our students to think critically about their childhood assumptions.

I’ve argued elsewhere that we have a lot of such definitional baggage:  topic sentences, transitions, the “writing process,” paragraphs themselves, that we need to re-think before we recapitulate and further propagate these misconceptions. 

They might have value for some age groups as developmental concepts, but by the time students hit a college classroom, we need to bring our teaching closer to the reality of adult writers.

Through the sheer numbers of students they have to teach, high school teachers (I was one) need to keep things relatively simple.  Hence, the five paragraph essay.

While numbers pressure is building in Community and 4-year colleges, the maturity of our students demands that we exhibit the critical thinking that we expect of them.

The watchword of pedagogy when I first started teaching in the 1970s was “relevance.”   While I’m more than a little skeptical of the notion as a guiding light, it might nevertheless be useful to think of debunking inherited oversimplifications in our classrooms as one of the more “relevant” of our responsibilities.

By the way, in the interests of blatant self-promotion, if you are looking for an exercise on similes without “like” or “as,” you can find one in Copia, my workbook on figurative language, linked on the home page of this blog.

A concept we need to obsolete: the topic sentence.

I presume, in this discussion, that as English teachers we value precision in our language.  Otherwise, as Orwell has written so eloquently, our slovenly writing becomes slovenly thinking, which in turn reinforces our slovenly writing.  If this presumption is true, though, we have some housecleaning to do.

We were taught about topic sentences in grade school:  my wife, who made a career as a 7^th grade English teacher, tells me her district introduced the concept in 4^th grade.  They are also defined in our college handbooks (Hacker, Sommers, A Writer’s Reference, 7^th Ed) and online resources (Purdue OWL).  Hence, they are a familiar entity we’ve grown up with, hardly worth thinking about.  

So let’s, for once, think about them.

First, it seems a useful question to ask if real writers write topic sentences.  Erika Lindemann, in A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (3^rd), cites studies that conclude, “anywhere from 50 percent to 80 percent of the paragraphs written by accomplished professionals do not contain topic sentences” (emphasis in original).

There are pedagogical reasons to expect topic sentences in every paragraph:  classrooms are laboratories, and we are teaching basic structures; students need structural constraints in order to control what can amount to a flood of words; we only have so much time to read student writing, so we need to control length as well as structure.

But if we are going to defend this practice, we need to be at least honest about how artificial it is, and have students read arguments which consist of several paragraphs.  Martin Luther King’s four-paragraph defense of disobeying unjust laws in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” might be helpful here.

The Online Oxford English Dictionary defines “topic” initially in terms of the word’s application in ancient rhetoric’s “commonplaces.”  This leads to the third definition, which is what we normally associate with the word:  “The subject of a discourse, argument, or literary composition”.  No argument here, I would think. 

As a “grammar” term, the OED extends the definition:  “The part of a sentence which is marked as that on which the rest of the sentence makes a statement (comment), asks a question, etc.”  As usual, the OED editors provide examples taken from published prose, but in this case the models are about topicalization, not illustrations of the definition in use.  Presumably, the illustration has no meaning out of the context of a paragraph.

The problem with the definition and our application of it is its inadequacy to describe real writing.

Look at the paragraph below:

Any project that aims to challenge modern ideas by recalling older ones risks falling into nostalgia.  Defenders of rhetoric often invoke a utopian past in which wise and eloquent politicians provided effective leadership through the majesty of their words alone.  A glance at the journalism about recent presidential campaigns about the candidates’ lack of eloquence and in wistful comparisons with figures from the past, such as John F. Kennedy.  But the same magazine that lodged such a complaint during one recent campaign had also run an article after Kennedy’s inaugural address that looked back nostalgically to Adlai Stevenson…

Which sentence of the first two is the “topic” sentence?    Both refer to the romanticization of the past by people offering alternatives to the present.  The second mentions the domain of examples from rhetoric, and the specific examples given show the never-ending quest for the perfect example of “good rhetoric."

   

Isolated from its fellow paragraphs, we cannot really answer the question.  

Does it help to know that the book the paragraph comes from is Saving Persuasion by Bryan Garsten?  Now we see the second sentence is doing more than offering illustrative examples of an abstract approach to arguing from the past.  They are instead pertinent to the content of the entire work.

I raise this issue, because the definition of “topic sentence” assumes a self-contained context that a reader, particularly an unsophisticated one, may not understand or perhaps will miss if reading carelessly. 

The first difference between the two sentences is that only the second specifically mentions “rhetoric,” thus narrowing the scope of the more general first sentence (making it lower on the Abstraction Ladder than the opener). 

The other difference is that the second, being narrower, makes a specific claim that pertains to the topic—the issue at hand, nostalgic claims about a golden age era of deliberative rhetoric.

“Topic sentence” doesn’t account for what Garsten is doing:  using a broad introductory statement to pave the road for the claim of the paragraph, which is defended by several examples. 

Furthermore, this example demonstrates that we can’t treat paragraphs outside the context in which they appear.

Lastly, this paragraph rhythm is not unusual in non-fiction writing.

I want to assert two additional premises:

1)  All writing is argument.  Even expository writing makes the implicit claim that an explanation or description offered portrays what the writer claims it portrays.

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold   

      

       Wm. Carlos Williams

This poem seems like pure exposition, except it concludes with “they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold,” which is the language of judgment and motive, that is, of claims.  It “states a case” for why the narrator ate the plums which didn’t belong to him and pleads for forgiveness.

2)  Stephen Toulmin’s scheme of argument structure is an appropriate model for teaching the foundations of argument to college students of any ability.

Consequently, the better word for us to use to identify the issue at hand and the attitude toward it is “claim,” using Toulmin’s terminology.

Thesis sentences are claims.  But theses are defended by multiple arguments, each with its own claims and evidence.  Those arguments may be “found” among the classical commonplaces and frame the content.

Thus we move from grade school vocabulary to the world of adults, a worthy place for college composition teachers to be with their students.