Transition Words For Body Paragraph - How To Maintain A Ratio

Transition words are the best option if you want to enhance writing engagements. Transition words aim towards the building of fluency within your content. No matter what type of content you write, transition words make their way into the draft. Abrupt shifting in ideas or paragraphs often needs revisions. It creates logical gaps as well. Hence, these words hold great importance for helping ensure meaningful transactions between ideas. Further, there are two most common types of transition words. The first one is transition words for body paragraphs. But the other one is between paragraph transition words. Both types are equally important. This article, in particular, discusses the first one.

Most of us are aware of the importance of transition words. In some cases, students don’t know how to maintain a perfect ratio of these words in the body of a paragraph in assignment writing. In light of its significance, their overuse in academic writing is not advisable either. So let’s discuss how to maintain them. After two or three lectures on importance of transition words in the past, the student started using them unnecessarily. Most of the class assignments’ content contain high density of them. Let's consider an example and discuss its solution so that the students can know what is to be done.

Example:

Moreover, we performed a series of reactions. Furthermore, among them, some reactions showed positive results. However, the number of reactions with negative responses was far greater. Nevertheless, the list of reactions showing unexpected results went beyond our imagination. In conclusion, we must say that the results of the experiment were anti-parallel to what we studied in theories.

Isn’t the above example containing too many transition words in body of the paragraph? Yes, it does. It seems awkward if a paragraph contains more transition words than the ideas. So to cater this issue, the student’s awareness about how or when to use transition words in the body of the paragraph is very important.

When To Use:

As the definition explains, transition words are famous for being the linking words. So the students must use them to link two ideas. Excessive use of these words often confuse the reader. Hence to avoid over usage of these words in body of the paragraph, you should know when to use them. The correct way of using transition words for the body paragraph is to merge two concepts. You should see how the above paragraph will look after managing the ratio of transition words for the body paragraph.

Example:

We performed a series of reactions in a couple of past few days. Among them, some reactions showed positive results, while others gave negative responses. Surprisingly, the list of reactions showing unexpected results went beyond our imagination. In conclusion, we must say that the overall results of the experiment were antiparallel to what we studied in theories. We can conclude the following points after comparing high-density with low-density transition words paragraphs;
Both paragraphs contain only three things;

• The topic sentence
• The three types of results
• The conclusion

So the body paragraph must contain 2 to 4 transition words. They are more than enough.

1. The overuse of transition words like in the example above may confuse the readers.
2. The shifting between paragraphs needs transition phrases to introduce another set of ideas. The use of transition words at the start of paragraph is quite discouraging.

How To Use Transition Words For The Body Paragraph;

The best way of maintaining the transition words ratio is to count the number of ideas in a paragraph (as described above). Let’s see how it will work;

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Let’s suppose you have to describe two ideas in a paragraph. With each idea, you have to give evidence. After completing both ideas, the last step will be that of the linking sentence. Then you can maintain transition words ratio through the following step;

1. Start your paragraph with transitional sentences. You can write it by merging it with the topic sentence of the paragraph.
2. First, introduce the concept. Then use transition words (for example, for instance) before writing evidence.
3. Use transition words, and introduce the second concept. Again, use transition words (for example, for instance) before writing evidence.
4. Write concluding transition words before the conclusion. It will help the reader instantly find your paragraph’s linking sentence.

Hence, you can follow these four-steps for maintaining the ratio of transition words for the body paragraph. Despite the many benefits of using transition words, students must avoid its overuse. Remember, an excess of even the beneficial aspects may also harm you. In this context, maintaining the correct ratio of transition words in writing is important.