The Purpose Of Transitions

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I was asked to help with a transition here and a transition there. I don’t know much about transitions, but I have so far been able to muddle through without getting complaints. The person who asked me for transitions was trying to change a writing she did a while ago and repurposed it for something else now. And needless to say, there were paragraphs for different purposes thrown together, each pulling to a different direction. “Transitions. Transitions,” she demanded. There need to be transitions to smooth things over without harming the integrity and the meaning of the paragraphs.

Transition And Coherence

I have to say English has a higher demand for transitions. I don’t know if this is really true or such saying is really accurate, but I definitely feel this way. Sometimes I wonder why English wants things to be so smooth and seamless. I feel that this is just for formality or for appearance. Just think about it, our brain never asks for a transition when we jump from one thought to another. We can think about a comment somebody makes on our crazy weather one second, and the next second we move on to a tasty piece of rice doughnut filled with strawberry jelly, which we want to have for our breakfast the next day. We have no problem doing this jump and probably we are even happy that we have made the jump from our doomed weather to a delicious treat. We never tell our brain, “hey, we need a transition between weather and food.”

I seriously suspect that other languages don’t care about transitions so much. As long as you are not jumping all over the place, it is fine. A small bump here, a little digression there, a bit of ranting in the middle, a hasty statement etc. They are all tolerable as long as people understand you. I think here is probably the real difference between English and other languages. Other languages somehow want to provide convenience to people–as long as people understand each other and don’t get confused, you can use the language in whatever way you desire. English doesn’t take care of conveniences–English is probably a person who’s gregarious and a little drunk when he (or she) accepts words from all over the places without shorten them or make the pronunciation or spelling more consistent. When this person wakes up from his (or her) drunken night, he starts to pick and choose arbitrarily–this word is only suitable for this occasion; a similar word has to be used for another occasion. He calls the difference “subtlety”, which a non-native speaker will probably never master.

Google says transitions provide greater cohesion by making it more explicit or signaling how ideas relate to one another, but this is just one perspective. An alternative interpretation is that a transition hide or obscure the fracture or the disconnection between two paragraphs or two ideas. And the second interpretation is probably used as frequently as the first one.

Choppy Or Smooth

As a non-native speaker, I am also a little amused whenever I hear native speakers say, “it is choppy. Let’s smooth it out.” I really don’t understand this passion for smoothness. Why does a writing have to be smooth? I mean a lot of things are not smooth. I mean anything that is a little challenging or a little difficult will not be very smooth. However, we have to have smooth writing even if we are describing a non-smooth life or love or journey.

A google search tells me that choppy in writing means using short sentences. Well… I like short sentences. I don’t understand why long sentences deserve more consideration or rank higher than short sentences. I like them both since each serves different purposes. A long sentence followed by a short one is probably better than many long sentences stuck together.

I guess I just don’t understand native speakers. I mean they must have their own aesthetic reasoning to favor one and disfavor the other, which I don’t understand.