Puzzle Pieces: Effective Transitions
Purpose: This activity should help students identify effective and creative transitions in the essay by restructuring the final draft. It should also show them how to allow the connecting ideas to serve as the transition in an essay vs. only using one-word transitions. Use with “Adaptations, Limitations, and Imitations."
Description: The author of “Adaptations, Limitations, and Imitations” wrote in a process memo that he/she initially encountered difficulty trying to organize the paper logically, but the final draft was structured beautifully. By cutting up this essay into individual paragraphs, students are forced to seek out connecting ideas as they try to organize the essay in a logical way. Students also see how different organizational structures can significantly change an essay.
Suggested Time: 30-40 minutes
Procedure:
1. Before class, make five copies of the essay and cut them up, separating the different paragraphs. (Numbering the paragraphs out of order may help in discussion). 2. Divide the class into no more than five groups, with 4-5 students in each group. Give each group one dismantled essay and ask them to put the pieces together in “logical” order. This may take up to 20 minutes. 3. Students should discuss among themselves (1) the essay’s progression, (2) what the transitions are, and (3) the lack of “obvious” conclusion (In brief, In Conclusion). 4. As a class, ask students how they organized the essay and why. (This is where the prior numbering would come in handy. For example, the group would be able to easily say “We think paragraph D goes first, etc). Ask them to identify the connecting ideas for each paragraph of the essay (i.e. the second paragraph connects to the introduction because it continues the anecdote about the writer’s sophomore year of high school). If the different groups disagree about where the paragraphs go, ask them to explain why they think.
5. To extend this exercise, students can bring in physical copies of their own drafts and similarly cut them up and rearrange (either rearranging their own essay or switching with a partner and rearranging their essay).
Note: For fans of Postmodernism or assemblage, you might also share with your students the concepts of cut-ups (e.g., used by William Burroughs and documented in our William Burroughs archive at FSU) or assemblage (as defined by Johnson-Eilola and Selber). Yes, this is a fun new way of looking at existing text, but it can also be a method of recreation, transformation, and composition.