Cohesion
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Definitions of Cohesion
1. Cohesion: The act, process, or condition of cohering, uniting, or sticking together.
2. Physics: The intermolecular attraction by which the elements of a body are held together.
3. Botany: The congenital union of parts of the same kind, such as a calyx of five united sepals.
4. Cohesion in writing: cohesion is the glue that holds a piece of writing together. In other words, if a paper is cohesive, it sticks together from sentence to sentence and from paragraph to paragraph.
- Cohesive devices include transitional words and phrases, such as therefore, furthermore, or for instance, that clarify for readers the relationships among ideas in a piece of writing.
- Repetition of key words and use of reference words are also useful to achieve cohesion.
Cohesion in Writing
Joseph M. Williams How to achieve cohesion in writing: There is more to readable writing than local clarity. A series of clear sentences can still be confusing if we fail to design them to fit their context, to reflect our main ideas. Sentences should all refer to the same set of conditions, but each lead us to understand the conditions from a different point of view.
- Put at the beginning of a sentence those ideas that you have already mentioned, referred too, or implied, or concepts that you can reasonably assume your reader is already familiar with, and will readily recognize.
- Put at the end of your sentence the newest, most surprising, the most significant information: information that you want to stress-- perhaps the information that you will expand on in your next sentence.
- Example: (1)Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists exploring the nature of black holes in space.(2) A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble.
- Even though sentence (2) is passive it creates better cohesion than the active sentence which would place the subject "black holes" at the end of the sentence. The challenge with English prose it to create the best compromise between the principles of local clarity and the principles of cohesion.
Beginning Sentences
Give readers a familiar context to help them move from the more familiar to the less familiar. From the known to the unknown. Each sentence should teach your reader something new.To lead your reader to whatever will seem new to that reader, you have to begin the sentence with something that you can reasonably assume that reader already knows. How you begin your sentences then, is crucial to how easily your readers will understand them, not individually, but as they constitute an entire passage.
Every time we begin a passage we must consider four elements that typically occur:
- To connect a sentence to the preceding one, we use transitional metadiscourse, such as and, but, therefore, as a result of, etc.
- To help readers evaluate what follows we use expressions such as fortunately, perhaps, allegedly, it is important to note, for the most part, under these circumstances, from a practical point of view, and politically speaking.
- We locate action in time and place: then, later, on May 23, in Europe, etc.
- We announce at the beginning of a sentence its topic -- the concept that we intend to say something about.
Managing the Flow of Information
The problem—and the challenge—of English prose is that, with every sentence we write, we have to strike the best compromise between the principles of local clarity and directness…and the principles of cohesion that fuse separate sentences into a whole discourse. In compromise, we must give priority to those features of style that make our discourse seem cohesive, those features that help the reader organize separate sentences into a single, unified whole. …[T]wo complementary principles of cohesion [are]:
- Put at the beginning of a sentence those ideas that you have already mentioned, referred to, or implied, or concepts that you can reasonably assume your reader is already familiar with, or will readily recognize.
- Put at the end of your sentence the newest, the most surprising, the most significant information: information that you want to stress—perhaps the information that you will expand on in your next sentence.
As you begin a sentence, you have to prepare your reader for new and therefore important information. Give your readers a familiar context to help them move from the more familiar to the less familiar, from the known to the unknown.
Connecting teachers to sentences, a visual example of how to connect writing more cohesively:
- All of us recognize this principle when a good teacher tries to teach us something new. That teacher will always try to connect something we already know to whatever new :*Sentences work the same way. Each sentence should teach your reader something new. To lead your reader to whatever will seem new to that reader, you have to begin that sentence with something that you can reasonably assume that reader already knows.
- How you begin sentences, then, is crucial to how easily your readers will understand them, not individually, but as they constitute whole passage. But in designing sentences in this way, you must have some sense of what your reader already knows about your subject.
Cohesion and Journalism
Paula LaRocque, the writing coach and assistant managing editor of The Dallas Morning News wrote an article titled “Short and choppy frequently omits sequence, meaning. (avoiding writing in a one-sentence-per-paragraph style).”, which gives us an insight into journalism and cohesion.
- One-sentence-per-paragraph writing is a common but unattractive convention in journalism. Such writing lacks basic organization - the grouping of information into the coherent and meaningful block of the paragraph. The style that results is less a style than it is a barrage of staccato, seemingly disparate, often transitionless facts. Every sentence has the same weight. No sentence seems either superior or subordinate. The work lacks dramatic pace and rhythm.
- Technology has changed [the days when it was easier to cut a whole paragraph than it was to excise a sentence from a paragraph]... but we still see such radically shortened paragraphs - chiefly because we want to avoid long, gray blocks of type. That's a worthy goal, but it doesn't merit abandoning an element of composition so basic it's taught in grade school. Newspaper writers can paragraph more often than writers of, say, an essay or a magazine article and still shape their material. They can occasionally paragraph a single line for emphasis. But automatically hitting the return at every period is a sad substitute for purposeful story organization.
- When we think or write, we form ideas sequentially and through association - a sequence and association that in turn promote reader understanding. Wrenching sentences from their most coherent setting and presenting them in artificial isolation damages clarity and polish.
Here is the article. If the link does not work, look up cohesion under articles on the Halle Library website.
Source Citation
Williams, Joseph M. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. The University of Chicago Press. (1990): 45-50.
LaRocque, Paula. "Short and choppy frequently omits sequence, meaning." The Quill 86.3 (1998): 33. General OneFile. Web. 17 Feb. 2010.
Additional Information
See Fall 2009 page for additional information 3. Cohesion
