Transitions as Speech Acts

Abstract

Current treatment of teaching transitions relies on an approach which presents students with lists of transitions to insert at unspecified places in the text. In addition, some textbooks and composition handbooks advise students to be “subtle” and warn against explicitly stating their purpose. This advice exists in spite of the fact that many professional writers are often explicit about the effect they intend in writing their transitions. Since handbook authors have failed to offer a general theory of how to write effective transitions, I propose that speech act theory can explain the function of transitions in terms of the illocutionary and perlocutionary effect of explicit performatives. An analysis of various samples shows that published writers regularly use explicit performatives in scientific, business, technical and academic writing. This analysis offers specific implications for improving handbook explanations and for instructing student writers in writing effective transitions by determining the illocutionary force of the specific speech act underlying each transitional device.