Transition Example

Sample transition from the writer’s idea to a citation from a text:


I came home from work as soon as I got my sister’s call. When I got home, my mom was in her bed, barely able to speak. She told me that her head hurt, and that she thought she needed to go to the hospital, and I began to feel very afraid. My fear made me indecisive: I couldn’t decide whether to take her to the hospital now, wait for my dad to get home, or call the paramedics so that someone with expertise could take over the situation. I was frozen by my fear. In Life of Pi, Yann Martel perfectly expresses what I felt. In it, Pi Patel is stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger. Despite these extreme life-threatening circumstances, Pi reflects that fear “is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life” (161). Standing there, over my mom, I knew I had to act.
My fear, and not the undiagnosed brain aneurism bleeding inside my mom’s skull, was the greatest threat to my mom’s life. That fear was preventing me from taking action, just as Martel describes it:

fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into
your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries
to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier… You
become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured…
But to your amazement… reasons is laid low. You feel yourself weakening,
wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread (161).

This was what I was experiencing, but somehow I was able to recognize it and break out of my paralysis. “Mom,” I said, “I need you to get up and get into the car with me – I am taking you to the hospital.”