The Transitioning Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode Transitioning.

Hello, I'm Helen Sword, and this is Helen's Word. Welcome to my podcast series, Swordswings, for writers in motion. You can listen to this while you're out for a walk, or riding a bus, or cleaning your kitchen, at a time when you're not writing, but maybe thinking about your writing, or possibly taking a break from your writing.

The theme of today's Swordswing is transitioning. This was a question that came up in my Writespace online writing community. Stephanie from Australia wrote in, on the bulletin board in the Writespace lounge:

Hi friends, I'm nearing the end stages of writing my thesis. And I'm looking for some exercises, information, instructionals on how to write good transitions. I particularly struggle with the transitions between the big movements in my argument and sections within chapters. I'm keen to read or watch any articles, books, etc. that you can recommend. Thanks.

So this is for Stephanie and for everybody else out there wondering about transitions.

First I'd like to invite you just to think about the transitions that you're making as you move through space while you listen to this podcast. Maybe you're walking along a city street or through a neighborhood. Maybe you're just walking around your house or you're riding a bus or a train moving along. If you're wandering through a house, or if you can do that right now, think about how you get from room to room. How do you know that you're making a transition?

Well, it's pretty obvious in most cases, isn't it? There's a doorway. Some kind of lowering of a ceiling or stairs. Some kind of physical cue that you're moving from one space into another. If you're out on the street, there might be something like moving from the sidewalk into the street to cross it on a crosswalk. You've got that height differential between the sidewalk and the street. You've got the path marked out for the transition itself. You know when you've come to the other side because you raise your foot again, step up the curb onto the sidewalk again. So those transitions are marked out for us physically.

Now imagine you're walking down the street, or maybe you are, and you're just transitioning from, let's say, light to shade. You've walked out of the sunlight under a tree, then back to the sunlight again. That's a more subtle transition. You feel it. The temperature changes. The light changes. It's a transition that may move around over time as well. It hasn't been hard coded into the streetscape. So we have subtle transitions, and then we have those very clear ones that get us from one place to another. As writers, we need to be thinking about making clear transitions for our reader. We can also have those more kind of mood transitions, like walking through the shade under the tree, just to add some nuance to our style. That's more a kind of stylistic shift, I would say. What Stephanie is talking about is transitions from one part of an argument to another, one section within a chapter to another, possibly from one chapter to another in a thesis.

So let's think about how we signal transitions to our readers. At the sentence level, we know that we're transitioning from one sentence to another because there's a period, a full stop. Right? We have punctuation that signals transition from one sentence to another. We also have transitions within sentences with semicolons, and commas and things like that. Punctuation is one way that we guide our reader in these transitions on the level of grammar and syntax. At the paragraph level, we have the line break. And depending on what publication you're reading, sometimes there's actually a whole space between paragraphs. But at the very least, there's usually one line that ends, the next one maybe has an indentation, and there's some white space in there. Think about poetry. Every time you get one of those line breaks, you move into a new stanza, as we call it. And what's a stanza? Well, in Italian, it's a room. So every time you're moving across that white space, you're going through the doorway. You're marking the transition into a new room, a new section of the poem.

Paragraphs work the same way in prose. Each one is taking us into a new room, a new paragraph. Then when we scale that up, let's say you have sections within a chapter. How are we going to signal those transitions to our readers? Well, we usually have, again, some kind of white space. We might have headings, bolded or in a different type. We might have subheadings within that as well to show that we're moving from one part of a section to another part of a section. So those serve as signposts as well. Transition ahead. Take a pause. Carry across what you've brought with you. You're crossing the road now. You're walking through the doorway. You're moving maybe under the tree and back into a new patch of shade or patch of sunlight from the shade. And then the transitions between chapters are even more obvious. You might have even bigger type. You might have a whole blank page that you turn or a new page that you turn to. And of course, we see all of these things, particularly in books.

We have a table of contents that also tells us where those major transitions will be. What are the chapters? What page does each start on? All of that white space, the punctuation, the headings. Table of contents, all of those things are part of what we call the paratext. So if you think of your text as being the content, the words, the argument, the paratext is everything else that's guiding the reader.

At the level of something like a book or a journal, the paratext also includes things like the index, the cover. Even just what the cover looks like is already guiding us on what kind of book to expect. The title page, the acknowledgments, all of these things that are not text - actually the acknowledgments section is text, and some of them like a table of contents may be text - but they're also paratext and that they're telling you about the text.

So in any thesis, in any article, in any book, you already have a lot of visual guides to where the transitions are. Your reader sees them. You want to make sure those are clear, obviously. The fewer visual cues you have like that, the harder your reader is going to have to work to find the transitions between different parts of your argument. So... A well structured chapter or thesis isn't actually going to need a whole lot of explicit signposting in the text itself. And Stephanie, if you want a really great resource on how to, not so much think about transitions, but how to move, how to signpost, then I would particularly recommend Stephen Pinker's book, The Sense of Style.

This is a really great book about how to move from one one part of your text to another. Pinker, who's a linguist - a psycho-linguist, he's always thinking about what's going on in the reader's brain when you're reading, and how can we as writers write in a way that's going to be helpful and kind to our readers. He gives an example in his book. I'm going to read from it. He says:

The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. The first subsection introduces the concept of metadiscourse, followed by one of its principal manifestations, the use of signposting. The second subsection reviews three issues. The problem of focusing on a description of professional activity rather than an exposition of subject matter. The overuse of apologetic language. And the disadvantages of excessive hedging.

And he goes on a bit longer and then he says:

Did you get all that? Probably not. That tedious paragraph was filled with meta discourse. So discourse about discourse. Verbiage about verbiage. Subsection. Review. Discussion.

Inexperienced writers often think they're doing the reader a favor by guiding her through the rest of the text with a detailed preview, but in reality, previews that read like a scrunched up table of contents are there to help the writer, not the reader. At this point in the presentation, the terms mean nothing to the reader, and the list is too long and arbitrary to stay in memory for long.

So that's an interesting distinction, I think, between what a table of contents does, where you see the signposting very briefly, and then this meta discourse where it's explaining to you what each section's going to do, but in a way that is already, the writer already knows that stuff and doesn't know how to trim it down to make it more digestible.

And then Pinker continues:

The previous paragraph reviewed the concept of metadiscourse. This paragraph introduces one of its primary manifestations, the phenomenon of signposting.

So see what he's doing. And he writes:

Clumsy writers do a lot of that too. They unthinkingly follow the advice to say, say what you're going to say, say it and then say what you've said.

Pinker says this advice comes from classical rhetoric, where if you had a very long oration and people are just listening, the speaker would come back and kind of tell you where to come back. But when you're signposting for a reader, where they're not having to hold it all in their memory, they have all that paratext to help them. They already have the signposts there, so they don't really need all these complicated directions. So as Pinker says, You put more work into understanding the signposts than in seeing where they point to, like complicated directions for a shortcut which takes longer to figure out than the time the shortcut would save.

It's better if the route is clearly enough laid out that every turn is obvious when you get to it. And so Pinker goes on in this chapter then to give some examples of clunky signposting. and more nuanced signposting. So here's one:

This chapter discusses the factors that cause names to rise and fall in popularity.

That's the clunky signpost. Or you could just say, What makes a name rise and fall in popularity? And so we've got the signpost there. We also probably have it. A chapter title and other things that have already told us that this is what the chapter is going to be about. Pinker says another technique is to use the guiding metaphor behind classic style, which is vision.

So, treat the content of the passage as though it's happening in the world that can be seen with one's eyeballs. So the clunky version, the preceding paragraph, demonstrated that parents sometimes give a boy's name to a girl, but never vice versa. And the more nuanced version, as we have seen, so that's the signpost to what's come before, parents sometimes give a boy's name to a girl, but never vice versa. And so this implied seeing, we've already been there, we've already been in that room, as we saw in the last room. Such and such. Now we're in this room and we'll see a contrast to that. Well, now that we've explored the source of word sounds, we arrive at the puzzle of word meanings. So here, you're taking your reader on a walk, right?

So you're moving the reader through the text. Let's say that you're writing about the significance of colors in flowers in different cultures. You've got a paragraph that's going to be about red roses, white roses, and the rare and elusive blue rose. So if you're doing that at the sentence level, you might start out by saying something about the red roses represent passion. White roses by contrast represent purity. So that by contrast is that little back to what was in the previous sentence. As for the rare and elusive blue rose… it represents mystery or whatever. And again, or it represents something entirely different. So each of those little just phrases is hooking back and indicating a relationship to what's come before. It's not even signposting. You've already signposted for the reader with your headings and all your other things, telling them that you're going to talk about roses, making it clear that this chapter or this section is about rose colors. Now you're using these little transitional phrases just to get them through the doorways.

And so overall in your paragraph, you're going to want to have some kind of a hook, a thesis, something that makes your reader want to come along and get you to prove whatever it is that you talked about. Then you're going to give them evidence and examples, and by the end of the paragraph you want some kind of transformation in their understanding, or maybe you've convinced your reader of something. Scale that up. And the same thing happens at the paragraph level. So you might have your opening paragraph in a section where you discuss the color of roses generally. And you say something about red roses, white roses, and the rare and elusive blue rose, so that your reader knows that that's what's going to be coming up in the rest of the section.

As Steven Pinker has shown us, you don't have to say, in the next three paragraphs I will discuss, you can just allude to those three colors of roses, and your reader will follow you. First paragraph then, after that, will be about red roses. Next paragraph will be about white roses. Next paragraph will be about blue roses. And again, you might have some little transition, hooking back to what you've just done. What I would discourage you from doing is something I sometimes see, and I think people must get taught it in English classes or something, but it doesn't make that much sense to me, which is you put what should be the opening sentence of the white rose paragraph as your final sentence in your red rose paragraph. This is like you've put your transition before the paragraph break. To me, that's like you've got a doorway between the hallway in the bathroom and you take your toilet plunger and you stick it outside the bathroom in the hallway - just to signal the toilet and the bathroom is through this doorway..We've already been told the order of the rooms that we're going to go through so you don't need the white rose in the red rose chapter In the white rose paragraph. However, it might make sense to say something like, “In contrast to what we've seen with the red rose...”

You can scale this up again. You've got a section on red roses, a section on white roses, a section on the rare and elusive blue rose, within your chapter on the colors of roses. And again, you probably don't need a transition at the end of each section. Because we know where you're going next. We can see you've already given us some signposting at the very beginning of the chapter. We can see the next section heading says something about white roses. So all we need is that little something that helps us see that either we're building on the argument or we're making an entirely different argument or we're showing the paradox in the two arguments, we're showing similarity, in whatever it is that we're doing.

And that can be done in a sentence, maybe even in a few words. So, Stephen Pinker writes:

Like all writing decisions, the amount of signposting requires judgment and compromise. Too much, the reader bogs down in reading the signposts. Too little, and she has no idea where she's being led.

I think that's a really key point there. It's not your writing that is transitioning from one topic or chapter or section to another. It's you who are guiding your reader so they can make a smooth transition from one part of your argument to another. So if you shift your thinking about transition to what you're doing, to what your reader's going to be doing at that moment that's a really key move.

Wherever you are right now, you might just think about the transitions that you've gone through, even while listening this so far. Maybe you've walked from one street or one area to another. Maybe, if you're in the kitchen, you've moved from one task to another. Maybe you've moved from one mode of transport to another. You started out on a bus and now you're off it. You might just think about how did you, Prepare for each of those transitions. How did you know it was coming? Or were there any unexpected ones? Probably the bus came to a halt. Or there was a sign. Or you had some way of knowing you had finished a task. You picked up, you set something down. You picked something else up. If you think about those as analogies, like metaphors for writing, what would the equivalent be in a sentence where you're showing: I'm putting this down. I'm picking this up now. The bus has come to the stop. We're going to get out and walk now.

How did you prepare for each of those transitions? Probably you had something that told you it was coming. But much of it will have been subtle visual cues. So when you walk from one room of a house to another, most of the time, you don't have a sign over the door that tells you ‘kitchen’. The doorway is telling you that you're making a transition. And other things are giving you the cue that this is the transition. So we don't need an over signpost.

You might also think about how you felt as you made each transition that you've been making as you move through space. Do you feel confident when you make transitions? Have there been times when you've been tripped up? You didn't know that the sidewalk was transitioning to a street so you fell over the curb. And An example that I often think of there is my friend Michelle, who's blind, and she used to have a guide dog, Olive. The city we lived in, did this thing of creating sections of the city that were not fully pedestrianized. They were called mixed use zones. So the idea was they'd have sort of bricked or cobbled streets and people would be encouraged to just walk in the street. But cars could still go through there. And so, of course, I found that every Uber driver in the city knew that as a shortcut and used it as a kind of rat run.

Well, poor Olive, the guide dog, could not cope with the mixed use zone because there were no clear transitions. She had been trained to stop at a crossing, to wait. Until there was the noise of the crossing thing going beep, beep, beep. To hear when the traffic stopped and then to guide Michelle across. When there were no clear signposts at all and no clear signs of transition, then that was hopelessly confusing and very very frightening for Michelle. She could not go through that space. Somebody like me, who had a bit more understanding of what was going on than the dog did would have to take her on and guide her through.

Again, we can think of our writing the same way. I would defend any writer's right to mix genres, to muddle things up, to do things that are experimental by all means. The more you're doing that kind of writing, the more carefully you need to package it or signpost it or let your reader know that they are now entering a space of chaos or confusion or where the normal rules don't apply. And they may require some extra hand holding, the way that Michelle needed my arm to lean on and not just the guide dog. But that's a topic for another day, thinking about containers and structure containers for more chaotic kinds of structure. Most of the time, particularly in something like a thesis, you cannot go wrong by having clearly marked paratext, clear chapter, endings and beginnings, and headings,and subheadings, all those visual cues for your writer. If you've got all that, and you've got a strong introduction and conclusion that's showing the overall arc of your argument, then really very minor transitions are probably all that your reader is going to need to get from one section of your argument to the next.

So, Stephanie, I hope that was useful. I hope that anyone listening will join me in my WriteSPACE community. Join me on Substack. My newsletter there is Helen's Word. And ask your questions that you'd like to see me discuss in Swordswings, where I'm happy to take on any topic that you think would be interesting and enlightening to listen to when you're out and about, when you're a writer in motion on the hoof.

So, good luck with your transitions and whatever you do, keep on writing!

Helen