If you say, all that academic papers require is to make a claim, provide supporting evidence, and make a conclusion, and that only creative and critical thinking matters. Then you may not be entirely correct. A good vocabulary is as important as the rest of the elements. And as a college student, you don’t intend to lose your grades on such silly mistakes like the usage of transitional words, do you?
Creative writing or academic writing, both have a primary common ground, that is fluency in language skills. Likewise, the key to a fluent flow of thoughts is to connect the ideas to a sequence which can be done by using transition signals. If the transition words and phrases are applied incorrectly, the story may fail to express its logical order and significance, making it a lot more difficult for the readers to comprehend the meaning. Now let’s cut to the chase on what mistakes you must avoid in this context.
Overusing Transition Signals
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As a student, you may know a bunch of transitional terms, and this is when there occurs a chance of getting over-excited. Because of more stock of words, you may end up stuffing transitions in your academic papers overly. This complicates the content and makes it look choppy. It has come to the notice of a trusted research paper service, that students either fill a sentence, or sometimes an entire paragraph with too many transition words. Let’s take a look at this example –
Incorrect: John preferred Marketing of all subjects. Yet, he wasn’t able to score well. Therefore, he decided to take extra classes and eventually, improved himself. However, he nevertheless couldn’t make a first position.
Correct: Even though John couldn’t score well in Marketing, he preferred it of all subjects. He decided to take extra classes that eventually improved him. However, he couldn’t secure a first position in 3 years.
Muddling up the Cause-and-Effect Sentences
You may have come across questions asking you to orderly rearrange a set of muddled sentences that make complete sense. This is the case when you are supposed to write find out what the cause is and then mention the effect. But you have to keep this in mind, that you are the student here who is to write the assignment in a logical order. Your intention should not be to confuse your teachers. So, express your points with clarity. Example –
Incorrect: Students are failing to self-expression and are losing creativity. As a result, the use of AI-generated content in academia has become a threat.
Correct: The use of AI-generated content in academia has become a threat. As a result, students are failing to self-express themselves and are losing creativity.
Avoiding Punctuations
Because transition words are said to be ‘conjunctive adverbs’ they are meant to connect two independent ideas or connect two sections of a sentence. You can distinguish a main clause from a dependent clause, only if it can be used independently. Two dependent clauses are attached with a comma (,), whereas two independent ideas are connected with a semi-colon (;) or a period (.). This is a common rule of grammar that is often seen ignored. Understand with the help of this illustration –
The professor gave us one week to complete the assignment; despite this, Gracy couldn’t submit it on time.
Independent clause: The professor gave us one week to complete the assignment.
Transition: Despite
Dependent clause: Gracy couldn’t submit it on time.
There are different types of transition words which has different usage. Learn which category each of the words falls into, in order to set the clause connectors apart. It is because punctuations don’t work the same for all.
Inappropriate Use of Transitional Terms
Misrepresenting connections can make your readers lose interest in your paper and they may not continue to read further. There are some transition words that you may feel could be used interchangeably because of their similar meanings, but they may differ as per the grammatical context. These are a few specific instances –
- The terms ‘therefore’, ‘thus’, ‘hence’, and other similar words should be used in cause-and-effect situations, and not in any logical context.
Incorrect: Paul was asked to prepare a questionnaire; therefore, he chose to buy an essay online that included 20 questions.
Correct: Paul was asked to prepare a questionnaire without any specific guidelines; therefore, he included 10 open-ended, and 10 close-ended questions, all dedicated to the topic ‘Job satisfaction’.
- Students should note that the usage of ‘and’, ‘also’, ‘as well as’, and ‘so’ hold different values. The term ‘and’ refers to the text that has the same importance as the other elements in the lists. Whereas, the term ‘as well as’ emphasizes a new piece of information. Since all these words are considered to be informal, they must always be used in the middle of sentences, and not the first word of a line.
- Terms such as ‘although’ and ‘because’ introduces a dependent clause. Therefore, they should always be followed by a main clause.
These points may not be the end of the possibilities, but they are for sure the most common of all mistakes made by students. This was confirmed by PenMyEssays. Since now you know which errors to prevent in advance, always at least recheck your assignment once before handing it over.