Transition Words for Academic Writing: A Complete Reference

Writers on style, including Stanley Fish in How to Write a Sentence, have described good transitions as the mechanism that lets a reader move smoothly from claim to claim, often without noticing the work the writer put into the connections. [...] Writing guides such as Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing caution that inserting a word like 'therefore' without a real causal chain behind it asks the reader to accept a claim the argument has not actually earned. [...] Style guides such as Joseph Williams's Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace make the point that transitions should not be used to paper over a weak logical link; if a sentence needs 'however' or 'therefore' to disguise a gap in the argument, the fix is to strengthen the argument itself.