Free Essays

The Use of Transition Devices

The more transition devices we use in our writings, the better it is for the essay unity.

This is the way many of us think when it comes to putting down our thoughts on paper. However, William Zinsser does not think so. In his essay "Simplicity", the American essayist demonstrates that even though connections within the paragraph are important, we do not need to crowd our writings with all sorts of artificial links. On his own example, the writer shows us the best way to use various transition devices, such as repetition of key words, transitional words and phrases, synonyms and parallel sentence structure, to create coherence within the paragraphs. One of the devices the writer uses in 'Simplicity' is repetition of the key words. The word "Perhaps", for instance, appears 5 times. This shows us how likely certain things are to stop people from understanding the text. Later on, Zinsser repeats words "careful" and "carelessness" twice, highlighting that it is negligence that causes confusion of the reader. The last example is the word "sentence" mentioned five times in this paragraph. This emphasizes the importance of making every sentence clear.

As for the transitional words, Zinsser does not use too many of them here. In fact, the only such word is "if". It is used only once to show the connection between the cause (carelessness of the writer) and the result (confusion of the reader). Most of the time, the essayist does not rely on the transition words to create the link. His sentences are naturally flowing one into another. Sentence B is always a logical sequence of Sentence A.

Synonyms are very helpful for creating unity of the text. For this reason, Zinsser uses a couple of groups of synonyms. At the beginning of the paragraph, he echoes words "cluttered sentence", "verbiage" and "shuddered construction". These help us see how important it is to keep the sentence clean. Later on, the writer gives us two synonyms "connection" and "link", that emphasize the significance of the paragraph agreement.

Many of us like alternating nouns and pronouns meaning to eliminate repetitiveness from our writings. In contrast, Zinsser has almost no pronouns in his essay. He uses "the writer" and "the reader" in every sentence. This makes paragraph more unified and does not let us get confused.

Parallelism is the last transition device used by Zinsser in his essay 'Simplicity'. Following sentence "The carelessness can take any number of forms", come five parallel sentences starting with "perhaps". This makes it easier for us to organize our thoughts and to see the different forms of carelessness that can affect our writing.

As you can see, most of the time, we are trapped in the habit of using as many transition devices as we can possibly find. We think that such a technique will make sentences and paragraphs in our essay better connected. In this paragraph, however, William Zinsser shows us that, sometimes, the best link is an absence of an artificial link and the most important for the harmony of an essay is the clearness of its idea.