By Diana Hamilton
Writing Resource: Harvard College Writing Center’s Warning Against “Velcro”
Many students come to the Writing Center needing to develop stronger transitions, whether the need for connection appears on the level of the word, the sentence, the paragraph, or the overall argument. Sometimes, a simple list of common transitional phrases (like this one) is the best resource for getting started on this task. I especially like to use these lists as a way of “testing” the connection between sentences, and I encourage students to identify the different uses of transitional phrases with similar meanings—the difference between an “and” and a “moreover.”
When I want a more in-depth explanation of a structural question, though, I often turn to Harvard College Writer Center’s online writing resources (many of which are collected under our website’s resources, too). Their section on transitioning (subtitled: “Beware of Velcro”) uses an extended metaphor of a writer guiding readers across a river with stepping stones; if the stones are too few or too far apart, the readers will be left behind.
This metaphor must itself be left behind, though, when the resource discusses the dangers of using transitions to hide a lack of real connection between two ideas. Instead of crossing a river with stones, the writer is now a would-be repairer of walls:
A strip of Velcro on a cracked wall will not fool us into thinking we are standing somewhere safe; neither will a Velcro transition persuade an essay’s readers that they are in the hands of a serious writer with something serious to say.
All this leads up to my favorite part, which I often highlight after printing it out for students in sessions: the author notes that, “in a well-crafted essay, every sentence is a transitional sentence.” I try to remind myself of this when editing to make writing feel more connected—to improve “flow,” as students often request. If every sentence is transitional, the decision to use (or not use) specific transitional words is a question of context and need. It helps emphasize that there’s no one right answer, no specific “however” that will bring two ideas together, but a set of writerly decisions to be made with some of these lexical units in mind.
Published February 10, 2015
