The Room Principle: How to Make Each Sentence Count?

Every IELTS teacher is obsessed with transitions.

"How do we get from paragraph A to paragraph B? We need a bridge! We need furthermore! We need however! We need consequently!"

But good sentences shouldn't need those bridges. They create and deliver their own logic (on their own).

Think of each sentence as a room. You walk in, you see what's there, you walk out. The next room? Same thing. You don't need a hallway with signs saying "NEXT ROOM THIS WAY" and "YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE PREVIOUS ROOM." You just move from room to room, and the arrangement makes sense because it's been arranged sensibly. And, we repeat, each room is a sentence.

Let's see in practice:

With unnecessary transitions: "The coffee was cold. However, I decided to drink it anyway because I was tired. Furthermore, as I continued drinking, I actually enjoyed the bitter taste. Consequently, over the following weeks, I began to prefer cold coffee to hot."

Without transitions: "The coffee was cold when I picked it up from the counter. I decided to drink it anyway instead of asking for another one. I realized that I actually enjoyed the cooler taste. I began to seek out cold coffee intentionally in the following days."

The second version trusts the reader to follow the logic. And the reader can. Readers can work out the logic. They don't need you to hold their hand through every connection, showing signs where is where.

❗️BOTTOM LINE:

We don't mean to kill transitions completely. You should use them wisely. If you keep adding transitions for the sake of adding, your essay will look forced and soulless. But using a few careful transitional phrases is always okay and, in fact, encouraged. It is fine if you have bad transitions in your first draft. And it okay if your first draft completely ignores the Room Principle. But when you revise, you should refine!

The next snippet from Atlas will be about revisions!