Applying Feedback to Your Paper: Transition Feedback

Last update 3/27/2018

 

Visual: Walden logo at bottom of screen along with notepad and pencil background.

Audio: Guitar music.

 

Visual: “Walden University Writing Center. Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears in center of screen. Background changes to a laptop and notebook a person is writing in on a table with the title “Applying Feedback to Your Paper: Transition Feedback.”

The screen then changes to show a sample paper with the following paragraph. There is feedback in a comment bubble from writing instructor Beth Nastachowski as well:

The qualitative research method used in the study was a one-hour interview of seven total participants; four human resource (HR) directors and three senior managers. Additionally, the participants of the study were from multiple organizations in England and the interviews were conducted from April to September 2013. Moreover, permission was granted for all interviews to be voice-recorded and transcribed. First, the research participants were asked open ended questions about individual psychopathic managers within the organization, whether from personal experience or from the experience of other employees who reported extreme behaviors when attempting to work with the manager. Then, part of the study involved the participants rating managers within the organization on a level of one to ten for potential psychopathy. Consequently, the participants explained the extremely stressful and dysfunctional work environment that the psychopathic managers created, such as creating lower departmental cooperation, a culture of fear, and a life-threatening workplace, ultimately leading to a higher than normal turnover rate. For example, specific examples of psychopathic behavior among the managers were provided, such as fraud, bullying and intimidation, abusive control, coercion of resignations of those who wouldn’t obey the psychopath, unethically handling resignations personally without involving HR, and threats to the employee and their family, including murder (which sent this specific manager to jail). The findings of the study resulted in bringing to light the disrespectful side of organizational managers, where the lack of credibility and competence in the psychopaths’ capabilities lead to deviant behavior of mistreating employees that worked for the psychopath. Finally, the theoretical expectations of the study concluded that corporate psychopaths engaged in fraudulent activity, were unconcerned about ethics nor organizational destruction, and ultimately created an unbearable environment where many employers could no longer work.

Comment bubble:

I noticed that throughout this paragraph, you start almost every sentence with a transitional phrase. Transitional phrases can be really useful tools to help connect your ideas, but they also can become repetitive if they’re used too much.

 

Read through your draft, noting all of the transitional words you’ve used; then go through and cut back, deleting unnecessary transitional words where you can to avoid this repetition.

Audio: In this video, we’ll focus on how to apply transition feedback to your writing. This kind of feedback might also be called cohesion feedback, flow feedback, or even clarity feedback.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to watch our introductory video first, “Applying Feedback Principles.”

What might that transition feedback look like?

Here’s an example: In this comment, the writing instructor is pointing out the transitional word “additionally,” noting a pattern in this student’s paragraph where each sentence starts with a transitional word. The writing instructor explains that this pattern can become repetitive and asks the student to read through the paper to remove repetitive transitional words.

 

Visual: The screen changes to a second sample paper with the following paragraph and a comment bubble from writing instructor Beth Nastachowski:

Nursing professional standards are developed to guide behaviors and processes to assist in improving patient outcomes. The American Nurses Association (2010) identified the professional planning standard as “the registered nurse develops a plan that prescribes strategies and alternatives to attain expected outcomes” (p. 43). It is important that hospitals establish polices to assure nursing professional practice reflects this standard.  Silow-Carrol, Edwards, and Lashbrook (2011) suggested evaluating top-performing hospital for methods they have implemented that make them successful.  Effective strategies include achieving clinical excellence, investing in quality improvement strategies, ensuring smooth care transition at discharge, identifying high-risk patients, providing through patient education, connecting patients with supportive resources, connecting appropriate patients with telehealth support, ensuring through communication with all stakeholders, and following up with patients post-discharge to ensure a smooth transition (Silow-Carrol et al., 2011). Nurse leaders have the opportunity to encourage professionals standards that focus on excellence as well as policies and procedures based on holistic care; they can influence the best patient outcomes.

Comment bubble:

Here, your sentences seem a little choppy. I see how this sentence about hospitals assuring professional practice reflects nursing professional standards connects, but it reads as a little choppy. Part of this is also because each of these first three sentences uses similar sentence structure, which makes it seem a bit repetitive as well.

Take another look at this sentence, adding a transition to help connect this sentence to the previous sentence. This transition doesn’t have to be just a word like “additionally,” but could just help connect these ideas more clearly for the reader and avoid the repetitive sentence structure.

As the speaker continues, she points out the components of the feedback in the comment bubble.

Audio: Here’s another example: In this comment, the writing instructor is noting the opposite problem—a lack of transitions. In this case, the sentences read as a little choppy without a transition and because these sentences follow very similar sentence structure. The writing instructor asks the student to review the sentence and add a transition to improve the sentences’ flow.

Note that in this second example, the writing instructor does not explicitly ask the student to look for other places to add transitions. However, the student should still look for other places to apply this feedback and avoid choppiness; whether the person giving you feedback explicitly asks you to apply the feedback or not, the reality is that we often make similar mistakes throughout our writing. So, even when you aren’t explicitly asked to apply feedback in your writing, make sure you do so anyways.

 

Visual: The screen changes to show the following slide: Appropriate Revision Strategies

Highlighting: underlining, circling

Read your draft aloud: Identify choppiness or repetition

Audio: Before we look at how to apply transition feedback throughout your paper, let’s talk about the revision strategies we recommend you use when applying transition feedback.

First, try highlighting or some form of highlighting, like underlining or circling. This strategy works particularly well if you’re using too many transitional words or too much of the same transitional word. Identify the transition you need to revise, then read through your draft looking just for that transition and mark them. Then once you’ve gone through your entire paper, go back to those highlights to revise those transitions.

Second, try reading your draft aloud. We can often identify choppiness or repetition by hearing it, so reading your draft aloud will help you identify other places you may need to revise. You can even try reading your draft aloud to a family member or friend; conversely, you might even ask your family member or friend to read your draft to you. Again, these approaches just help you hear your writing in a different way, identifying places you may need to revise.

 

Visual: The screen changes back to the first sample paper. The speaker points out the components of the feedback comment she should pay attention to and then highlights the repetitive transitional words in the paragraph, as follows:  

The qualitative research method used in the study was a one-hour interview of seven total participants; four human resource (HR) directors and three senior managers. Additionally, the participants of the study were from multiple organizations in England and the interviews were conducted from April to September 2013. Moreover, permission was granted for all interviews to be voice-recorded and transcribed. First, the research participants were asked open ended questions about individual psychopathic managers within the organization, whether from personal experience or from the experience of other employees who reported extreme behaviors when attempting to work with the manager. Then, part of the study involved the participants rating managers within the organization on a level of one to ten for potential psychopathy. Consequently, the participants explained the extremely stressful and dysfunctional work environment that the psychopathic managers created, such as creating lower departmental cooperation, a culture of fear, and a life-threatening workplace, ultimately leading to a higher than normal turnover rate. For example, specific examples of psychopathic behavior among the managers were provided, such as fraud, bullying and intimidation, abusive control, coercion of resignations of those who wouldn’t obey the psychopath, unethically handling resignations personally without involving HR, and threats to the employee and their family, including murder (which sent this specific manager to jail). Thus, the findings of the study resulted in bringing to light the disrespectful side of organizational managers, where the lack of credibility and competence in the psychopaths’ capabilities lead to deviant behavior of mistreating employees that worked for the psychopath. Finally, the theoretical expectations of the study concluded that corporate psychopaths engaged in fraudulent activity, were unconcerned about ethics nor organizational destruction, and ultimately created an unbearable environment where many employers could no longer work.

Audio: Now that we know what transition feedback might look like and the revision strategies we might use to revise transitions, let’s apply this feedback in the papers.

Here’s our first comment about the repetition of the transitional words that start these sentences. To revise, I’m going to use our highlighting strategy to first identify all of the transitions.

 

Visual: The speaker now goes through and removes unnecessary transitional words, leaving some transitional words that help create flow in the paragraph, as follows:

The qualitative research method used in the study was a one-hour interview of seven total participants; four human resource (HR) directors and three senior managers. The participants of the study were from multiple organizations in England and the interviews were conducted from April to September 2013. Permission was granted for all interviews to be voice-recorded and transcribed. First, the research participants were asked open ended questions about individual psychopathic managers within the organization, whether from personal experience or from the experience of other employees who reported extreme behaviors when attempting to work with the manager. Then, part of the study involved the participants rating managers within the organization on a level of one to ten for potential psychopathy. The participants explained the extremely stressful and dysfunctional work environment that the psychopathic managers created, such as creating lower departmental cooperation, a culture of fear, and a life-threatening workplace, ultimately leading to a higher than normal turnover rate. For example, specific examples of psychopathic behavior among the managers were provided, such as fraud, bullying and intimidation, abusive control, coercion of resignations of those who wouldn’t obey the psychopath, unethically handling resignations personally without involving HR, and threats to the employee and their family, including murder (which sent this specific manager to jail). The findings of the study resulted in bringing to light the disrespectful side of organizational managers, where the lack of credibility and competence in the psychopaths’ capabilities lead to deviant behavior of mistreating employees that worked for the psychopath. Finally, the theoretical expectations of the study concluded that corporate psychopaths engaged in fraudulent activity, were unconcerned about ethics nor organizational destruction, and ultimately created an unbearable environment where many employers could no longer work.

Audio: Now that I know where I need to revise, I’m going to analyze these transitions, identifying which ones I want to keep and which I want to remove. Of course, removing all transitions might make these sentences choppy, so I need to be careful to strike a balance.

 

Visual: The screen changes to the second sample paper. The speaker adds new transitions to the paragraph to increase flow, as follows. The new transitions are highlighted:

Nursing professional standards are developed to guide behaviors and processes to assist in improving patient outcomes. The American Nurses Association (2010) identified the professional planning standard as “the registered nurse develops a plan that prescribes strategies and alternatives to attain expected outcomes” (p. 43). It is important that hospitals establish polices to assure nursing professional practice reflects this standard.  To assist with effective planning, Silow-Carrol, Edwards, and Lashbrook (2011) suggested evaluating top-performing hospital for methods they have implemented that make them successful.  These effective strategies include achieving clinical excellence, investing in quality improvement strategies, ensuring smooth care transition at discharge, identifying high-risk patients, providing through patient education, connecting patients with supportive resources, connecting appropriate patients with telehealth support, ensuring through communication with all stakeholders, and following up with patients post-discharge to ensure a smooth transition (Silow-Carrol et al., 2011). Thus, nurse leaders have the opportunity to encourage professionals standards that focus on excellence as well as policies and procedures based on holistic care; they can influence the best patient outcomes.

Audio: Let’s look at the second paper. In this comment, the writing instructor noted the missing transition and the choppiness in these sentences. To revise, I’m going to consider how this sentence fits with the previous sentences, adding a transition that helps connect them.

Now, I’m also going to read more of my paragraph to see if there are other places I can add transitions. I’ll use the strategy of reading my paper aloud to find these places throughout this paragraph, and then I should do the same in the rest of my paper too.

Audio: And the process continues! You should use this process as many times as you need to apply transition feedback you receive throughout your entire paper. Don’t worry—If this process seems complicated, trust us; it’ll get easier with time and practice.

 

Visual: The video ends with the following message: Walden University Writing Center

Questions? E-mail writingsupport@mail.waldenu.edu