• 3-minute read
• 18th February 2017

Transitional Words (Making an Essay Flow)

A well-written essay should flow clearly between paragraphs and sections. This will help your reader follow your argument. However, it requires effective use of transitional words, phrases and paragraphs. In this blogpost, we look at how each of these should be used to enhance your written work.

Transitional Paragraphs

We’ll start out with connecting sections and paragraphs within an essay. This is to show how each new part of your essay is related to the previous one, as well as how each section contributes to your overall argument.

For example, if writing about the cuteness of baby animals, you might want to transition from a section discussing puppies to one about kittens.

Rather than simply leaping straight into the kitten talk, though, you could add a passage linking the two sections:

In the analysis above, we saw that the ‘baby schema’ (Lorenz, 1943) is used to explain human reactions to puppies. In the following section, I will examine whether this concept can also be used in relation to kittens.

Here, we quickly show how different parts of an essay are related to one another. These are also known as topic sentences, since they introduce a new topic for discussion.

This is especially valuable in longer essays, as your reader might need reminding of something you have discussed previously if it’s relevant to the current section.

Transitional Words and Phrases

Within paragraphs, it’s important that sentences flow into one another. Failure to do this can make writing seem choppy or make the connection between sentences unclear.

This is where transitional words and phrases come in handy. These are terms you can use to link sentences in a paragraph.

For example, in the following, we have three sentences with no transitions:

In the survey, 87% of people said that puppies are cute. 91% of respondents said that kittens are cute. 64% of people said that kittens are cuter than puppies.

This is a simplified example, so it’s fairly obvious what the sentences mean. But we can still make the relationships between them clearer by adding a few transitional terms:

In the survey, 87% of people said that puppies are cute. Furthermore, 91% of respondents said that kittens are cute. However, 64% of people said that kittens are cuter than puppies.

Here, ‘furthermore’ shows that the second sentence is an additional point following the first one. ‘However’, on the other hand, introduces a contrasting idea (i.e. a comparison between how puppies and kittens are perceived).

With the simple addition of these words, we remove any doubt about how the sentences are related. This might seem like a minor issue, but over the course of an entire essay transitional words and phrases can boost clarity a lot.