Transitions within paragraphs in your academic essay
How to Make Them Smoothly
You need to have a lot of quick ways of starting each thought that you build into each paragraph that you write. I’ve shown in a different article how you can make one paragraph flow into the next one, but here I’m talking about how you can make individual sentences flow together.
There are lots of stock sentence-starters out there, and you can generate your own with a little practice too. In the meantime, here are some standard phrases you can use to get going, and keep going.
For laying out an argument:
It’s clear that
because
firstly
so
Another reason is
Moreover
because
For stages within an argument:
To begin with
Next
Then
After that
Finally
Now
For comparing things:
X and Y are different, but they are also alike in certain ways.
For example, they both
They are also alike in that they
Y also resembles X by
Not that X and Y are identical, though.
Y does differ from X in one way.
Finally, both X and Y
For discussing things:
It’s been said that
because
The argument runs
Someone else who agrees with this is
This argument goes
On the other hand
A competing argument is that
This way of thinking suggests that
It’s clear that
because
For explaining things:
There are different reasons that
One explanation is that
Evidence for this is
Another explanation is
This idea is based on
There!
Like I say, you’ll be making up a lot of your own sentence-starters, of course. And you’ll find lots more every time you read, now that you’re looking for them. But in the meantime, this is a good box of ammo to get you going.
>>Have you thought about your essay format?
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