hello friends and welcome back to the channel in this video i'm going to walk you through uh a trick that i use to help with transitions transitions are kind of a pesky topic but if you uh if you apply some simple principles they're going to be a lot more easy uh than you would think i know a lot of students stress out about them but there's no need to stress i will walk you through them uh they are way more complicated or they're way less complicated than you thought uh they're a lot more afraid of
you than you are of them uh so let's get into this first we want to talk about what is the purpose between a tran or of a transition a transition is designed to do two things one tell your reader you are changing topics and two show your reader how your topics relate to each other and the thesis all right so these are your two jobs that you want to keep in mind and i'll show you a little bit about um kind of focusing one's essay in just a second here let me pull up handy dandy
ms paint so for instance think of your thesis as a straight line okay so we've talked about how a thesis is a subject plus an opinion plus how and why so for instance maybe my subject is uh uh condiments on hot dogs my opinion is that uh mustard and relish are the best condiments on hot dogs so if this is my subject and opinion think of that as uh this straight line and from there what you will need to do is each body paragraph will deviate from the uh main point but then it will come
back to why these uh condiments are the best condiments on hot dogs so you'll go out you'll you'll share an example but at the end of each paragraph you will come back to that thesis so that ultimately you are staying in sort of circling the same main point the difficulty that you have is if you have a thesis but then you sort of go off on a rabbit trail and never come home that is difficult or occasionally what will happen is students will sort of go off on a bunch of rabbit trails and never bring
them back home the goal of a strong uh of a strongly organized paper is to bring things back to the main point so that that way your reader always can see how each point connects back to the thesis so i'll show you this in in more practical detail uh here uh with transitions so tell your reader you're changing topics and then show your reader how the topics relate to each other and slash or the thesis so i'll show you uh here what that will look like so again if our thesis is best condiments on hot
dogs are uh mustard and relish then what i'm going to need to do is show when i'm trans transitioning uh paragraphs how my paragraphs relate to each other and then how they relate back to the thesis so giving you an example imagine i wrote an entire paragraph that was all about mustard alright and now i'm starting a paragraph that's about relish here's one thing that i want you to keep in mind it is a good idea not to end your paragraph with a transition and here is why a lot of times what i will see
is a student will say sort of uh you know let's say they're writing this paragraph about mustard and they'll say mustard mustard mustard buster mustard mustard mustard but actually relish what can happen is that the reader can get confused and think that you're going off topic rather than setting up your new paragraph what you want to do is if the paragraphs about mustard make that whole damn thing all about mustard and then when it's time for a new topic show your reader that you're changing topics and then show them how it connects to the old
topic so in this case let's pretend i have this paragraph about mustard and then i'm going to end it with a sentence so ultimately in light of all this evidence mustard is a good condiment to have on a hot dog let's pretend this was a whole paragraph but this is the last sentence so i'm ending on the point that this paragraph was about paragraph was about mustard my last sentence will be hey mustard is awesome now in my new paragraph that's where i'm going to transition and i'm going to transition using trick here transition using
the old plus new construction the way that works is um to include the topic the previous paragraph and the topic of the new paragraph in the opening sentence of the new paragraph this is the easiest way to transition you mentioned the old topic and the new topic when you open the new paragraph so down here when i'm going to start this paragraph about relish the way i'm going to do it is i'm going to start indent here and i'm going to start by mentioning the topic of the old paragraph so for instance while mustard is
a popular condiment relish is perhaps the most underrated uh condiment that uh belongs on a hot dog all right so what i've done here is i've said i've mentioned the topic of the last paragraph and then i've mentioned the talk topic of the new paragraph so here in this sentence what i've done is i've shown you hey i'm done talking about mustard now i'm going to be talking about this other thing and i also mentioned that they both belong on a hot dog which is a tie back to my thesis statement so you know now
that i'm beginning the new paragraph where i'm going notice how at the end in the end of this last sentence i've mentioned the topics that are the the main point and the thesis and now in the beginning of the new paragraph i'm mentioning last main point my new main point and the thesis i'm doing this so that the reader constantly knows how what i'm talking about relates to my thesis so if my thesis is best condiments on a hot dog what i'm doing is at the end of this relish or at the end of this
mustard paragraph i'm connecting it back to the thesis to start my relish paragraph and both of them are tied into this whole thesis that's all about uh the best condiments on a hot dog i hope this makes sense but ultimately that is the best way to go about transitioning in your paragraph so in sum transitions are there to tell your reader you're changing topics and to show your reader how the old topic related to the new topic and to the thesis and the best way to do it is the old and new construction so that
is writing a sentence at the beginning of the new paragraph that says hey i'm done talking about the previous topic and now i'm talking about this topic and it's important that you not do this at the end of the old paragraph but you do this at the beginning of the new paragraph so you close out the old paragraph and then in the news in your new paragraph your sentence says hey i'm done with that old one now it's time for this new one i hope that helps clear things up i'll see you in the next
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