Editing Transitions: What to think about; what to edit?

Sentences should logically follow one another, but often the writer will need to create the right relationship between words through transitional phrases.

Within a paragraph, sentence to sentence:

• Any place you shift time
• Any place you shift from point to reason
• Any place you shift from reason to example
• Any place you want to subordinate a sentence's point to another
• Any place you want to coordinate a sentence's point to another
• Any place you are leading in to an example
• Any place you are leading out of an example
• At the end of every paragraph and/or...
• At the start of every paragraph

Paragraph to Paragraph:

• Do you need a "hinge" or a "bridge"?

• Are you shifting to a new point on the same subject (same character, same author, same element, ...)

• Are you shifting to a new subject of sentences (new character, new author, new element)

• How did you set up your idea in the introduction?

How to edit:

• Read each sentence in pairs to test clarity or relationship, and write the relationship (time, example, contrast, etc.) in the gap above each pair.

• Read sentence one and sentence two...do they have a clear logical connection stated?

• Then, read sentence two and sentence three...do they have a clear logical connection?

• Paragraph to paragraph: read the end and start back to back paragraphs...