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.