What Is Cohesion in Composition?

Making Sense on the Sentence Level

By
Richard Nordquist
Updated on June 04, 2018

In writing, cohesion is the use of repetition, pronouns, transitional

expressions, and other devices called cohesive clues to guide readers and
show how the parts of a composition relate to one other. Writer and
editor Roy Peter Clark makes a distinction between coherence and cohesion
in "Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer" as being
between the sentence and text level by saying that "when the big parts fit,
we call that good feeling coherence; when sentences connect we call it
cohesion."
In other words, cohesion involves the way ideas and relationships are
communicated to readers, notes the Writing Center at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst.

Sticking Text Together

In the simplest terms, cohesion is the process of linking and
connecting sentences together through a variety of linguistic and semantic
ties, which can be broken into three types of semantic relationships:
immediate, mediated, and remote ties. In each case, cohesion is the
relationship between two elements in written or oral text where the two
elements may be clauses, words, or phrases.
In immediate ties, the two elements that are linked occur in adjacent
sentences, as in:
"Cory idolized Troye Sivan. He also loves to sing."
In this example, Cory is mentioned by name in the first sentence and
then conveyed in the second sentence through the use of the pronoun "he,"
which renames Cory.
On the other hand, mediated ties occur through a link in an
intervening sentence, such as:
"Hailey enjoys horseback riding. She attends lessons in the fall. She
gets better every year."
In this example, the pronoun "she" is used as a cohesion device to tie
the name and subject Hailey through all three sentences.
Finally, if two cohesive elements occur in nonadjacent sentences, they
create a remote tie wherein the middle sentence of a paragraph or group of
sentences might have nothing to do with the subject of the first or third, but
cohesive elements inform or remind the reader of the third sentence of the
first's subject.

Cohesion vs. Coherence

Although cohesion and coherence were considered to be the same
thing until around the mid-1970s, the two have since been differentiated by
M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's 1973 "Cohesion in English," which
says the two should be separated to better understand the finer nuances of
the lexical and grammatical usage of both.
As Irwin Weiser put it in his article "Linguistics," cohesion is "now
understood to be a textual quality," which can be attained through
grammatical and lexical elements used within and between sentences to
give readers a better understanding of context. On the other hand, says
Weiser:
"Coherence refers to the overall consistency of a discourse—purpose,
voice, content, style, form, and so on—and is in part determined by readers'
perceptions of texts, dependent not only on linguistic and contextual
information but also on readers' abilities to draw upon other kinds of
knowledge."
Halliday and Hasan go on to clarify that cohesion occurs when the
interpretation of one element is dependent on that of another, wherein "one
presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded
except by recourse to it." This makes the concept of cohesion a semantic
notion, wherein all meaning is derived from the text and its arrangement.

Making Writing Clear

In composition, coherence refers to the meaningful connections that
readers or listeners perceive in a written or oral text, often
called linguistic or discourse coherence, and can occur on either the local
or global level, depending on the audience and writer.
Coherence is directly increased by the amount of guidance a writer
provides to the reader, either through context clues or through direct use of
transitional phrases to direct the reader through an argument or narrative.
Cohesion, by contrast, is a way to make writing more coherent when
readers are able to make connections across sentences and paragraphs, says
the Writing Center at UMass, adding:
"On the sentence level, this can include when the last few words of
one set up information that appears in the first few words of the next.
That’s what gives us our experience of flow."
 In other words, cohesion is the semantic tool you use to make your
writing more coherent.

Nordquist, R. (2018). What is coherence in composition?

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-cohesion-composition-1689863