California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) English Practice Exam

In narrative writing, transitions help clarify the relationship between what?

1. Characters and their conflicts

2. Events and their outcomes

3. Main ideas and support

4. Sentences and structural elements

The correct answer is: Events and their outcomes

In narrative writing, transitions play a crucial role in connecting events and their outcomes, providing the reader with a clear understanding of the sequence and causality of the story. Transitions guide the reader through the narrative by highlighting how one event leads to another, which helps to maintain the flow of the story and keeps the audience engaged. This clarity in the relationship between events and outcomes is vital for creating a coherent narrative structure, allowing readers to follow the plot development and understand the consequences of characters' actions or decisions. The other options, while relevant to different aspects of writing, do not specifically address the primary function of transitions in narrative contexts. For instance, transitions can also relate to character motivations (which could involve conflict), but the core focus in narrative is how events unfold and influence each other, culminating in key outcomes in the story. In a similar vein, main ideas paired with support or the relationship between sentences and their structural roles pertain more to expository or argumentative writing rather than the primarily sequential nature of narrative writing.