Content Transitions
While transition words and phrases are a great way to connect and show relationships between ideas, they can get repetitive. Read this section to learn about another way to create stronger coherence in your writing. To better familiarize yourself with how authors show relationships between ideas, take a look at any published piece of writing (perhaps a book, a magazine, or even one of the segments from this course!) and see if you can identify content transitions and transition words that are used to connect the ideas.
Basically a content transition is a sentence that refers to what was just said to connect that information with what is about to be said. Here is just the first part of the "Corner Store" paragraph from earlier in the course:
I really love my job at The Corner Store for many reasons. For one thing, the work is easy. The bulk of what I do is cashing out customers at the register, making sure there is fresh coffee, and occasionally stocking shelves. None of these tasks is at all stressful and the store is usually not very busy, so there is a lot of free time I can use to do homework. Second of all, I work with really great people...
Instead of saying, "Second of all, I work with really great people," the author could say, "Even better than the easy work, the people at the Corner store are great". In this way, the author is referring to the idea that was just discussed (the first main idea about the easy work) and directly moving the reader into the new idea about to be discussed, "the people at the Corner Store are great". Much like a transition word or phrase might do, a content transition moves us from what we just read to what we are about to read. It also lets us know that this is in an emphatic order because the great people are "even better" than the easy work.
Content transitions can be used within a paragraph (such as the example here), but are particularly nice when writing longer pieces because they can help prevent repetition. In a longer essay where you need to think about showing connections not only within paragraphs but between them, content transitions give you a little more variety and choice as to how you go about showing relationships between ideas, so you don't have to repeat the same transition words over and over again.
Source: Erin Severs
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