Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/16025
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/16025
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I am writing an an article to share knowledge, not novel. Usually, when you change the current topic, at the beginning of the new paragraph you would like to use some [transition words](https://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/135/transw.html) such as _Addition_, _Next_, etc. However, if you don't want to use those words, you need a stronger indicator to tell the readers that the topic has been changed. I think drop caps are the best for this, but I'm using a platform which only support trivial characters. You can say that I must stick to Notepad. Is there any efficient ways to not using transition words?

* * *

**Respond to hildred:** Thank you for taking time answering my question. To clarify, I'm not rebelling anything. I acknowledge that those rules will help me structuring the article a lot. I just want to be a little different to give the readers a new taste.

I'm not prefer the horizontal rule, since it's like splitting my article into sections, which I don't intend it to be. Saying the topic will be changed completely after I start a new paragraph is not exactly right. It's like listing the ideas with bullets, but instead one sentence per bullet, you have one paragraph per bullet. Each paragraph starts with a topic sentence.

I do aware that I should use white space, I just don't know how to use it properly. When I write a story, I usually use lines with one dot only to sign the readers to take a breath, like this:

> **.**

Or this, if I want to give them more room to breath:

> **.**  
> **.**  
> **.**

But I'm not writing a story, I'm writing an academic article.

* * *

**Respond to what:** thank you for taking time answering me. Of courses the sections are related to each other. Let's take my SOP as an example. The purpose of SOP is to tell the professors that you have quality to their research (it's like the cover letters when you apply to a job). Here are three points I want to convey in my SOP:

- I believe that I was born for scientific research.
- I think I have been familiar to the scientific activities.
- I want to shift the discipline to biology after spending 4 years in physics.

Then I develop each point to a paragraph. Therefore, my whole SOP has this structure:

> I believe that I was born for scientific research...
> 
> I think I have been familiar to the scientific activities...
> 
> I want to shift the discipline to biology after spending 4 years in physics...

I don't want to use the structure below, since it will fail to put the topic sentence to the beginning of the SOP, which I intend it to be:

> I believe that I was born for scientific research...
> 
> Secondly, I think I have been familiar to the scientific activities...
> 
> Thirdly, I want to shift the discipline to biology after spending 4 years in physics...

Without a strong indicator, I think that this structure can confuse the readers a little bit since it change the point so quick. I understand that transition words are very strong, but I would like to find another method.

Original score: 1