CW4004:Writing

that Works
WEEK 10: STRUCTURING A PIECE OF WRITING:
COHERENCE AND COHESION
Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session you should be able to:

 Describe what we mean by cohesion and coherence and explain how
they describe different qualities of a piece of writing or text.
 Describe and use the following cohesive devices: reference,
conjunction, ellipsis, substitution.
 Describe and identify semantic fields in texts.
 Analyse your own writing and the writing of others for coherence
and cohesion.
 Do you structure and plan your writing? If so how?
 If not, why not?
 What strategies do you use to help you structure your writing?

Can you pass on any tips?

  A key part of the writer’s job it to present ideas
and information to the reader in a coherent
Creating structure.

Structure and Question: What does a coherent structure mean?

Coherence  You need to order your text so that your ideas can
be easily accessed, understood and processed by
the reader.

 Often the ideas are the easy bit! The tricky part can
be finding the right order to present them so that
your reader is led through your ideas and
arguments clearly and logically.
Texts,  Whenever one sentence comes after another,
Coherence readers need to be able to see a connection
between them.
and Cohesion
 Readers will assume that there is some sort
of connection between them and may be
bewildered or confused when they can’t find
one…
The northern United States and Canada are places where herons live and
breed. Spending the winter here has its advantages. Great Blue Herons
live and breed in most of the northern United States. It’s an advantage for
herons to avoid the dangers of migration. Herons head south when the
cold weather arrives. The earliest herons to arrive on the breeding grounds
have an advantage. The winters are relatively mild in Cape Cod.
(Pinker 2014, p.139)

Question: What makes the excerpt coherent?

What’s wrong
here? (1) Dog for sale. Eats anything and is fond
of children.

 Creating a text (rather than a string of sentences) is

about creating relationships and connections. We
can view these in terms of cohesion and coherence.
Cohesion and Coherence
Cohesion
The linguistic devices that
glue different parts of a text
together
 Grammatical Cohesion
 Lexical Cohesion
Coherence
The organization and
connection of ideas and
whether they can be
understood by the reader.
Coherence
  Be clear about the topic
Creating  Be clear about the point you are making
Coherence
 Keep the following things in mind as you write:
 What does the reader know? This will change as
you move through the text
 What is the context of interpretation?
 What is the genre of the text?
 Does the text flow – whether it is a piece of
academic writing or creative.
Read and “The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into
different groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile may
Remember be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to
go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step,
the Following otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any
particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do too few things at once
Passage than too many. In the short run that may not seem important, but
complications from doing too many can easily arise. A mistake can
be expensive as well. The manipulation of the appropriate
mechanisms should be self-explanatory, and we need not dwell on it
here. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon,
however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to
foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future,
but then one never can tell”
What’s your point?

 The reader needs to know what they should

be taking away from the reading.
 Is the writer trying to explain something,
argue something, provide new information,
or make some other sort of point.
Structure: Understanding Paragraphs
“the paragraph could be understood as a sort of literary respiration, with each paragraph
as an extended – in some cases, very extended – breath. Inhale at the beginning of the
paragraph, exhale at the end” (Prose 2006, p.66)

‘…there is no such thing as a paragraph. That is, there is no item in an outline…, no

unit of discourse that consistently corresponds to a block of text delimited by a blank
line or an indentation What does exist is the paragraph break: a visual bookmark that
allows the reader to pause, take a breather, assimilate what he has read, and then find
his place again on the page…Paragraph breaks generally coincide with…cohesive
chunks of text.’ (Pinker 2014, p.145)
Cohesion
Grammatical Cohesion
Conjunction: using connecting words

Reference: using a pronoun to refer to another word

Substitution: substituting one word or phrase for another

Ellipsis: leaving something out.

Conjunction
 Cohesion: Conjunction

Conjunction specifically describes words and phrases that express how

different parts of the text should be linked together.

What’s the difference between the following two sentences?

(3) Liv is confused. So, she is going to the party.

(4) Liv is confused. However, she is going to the party.

What do the connecting words tell us?

Cohesion: Connection words tell us about the
Conjunction relationship between two clauses or
sentences.
 GROUP 1 GROUP 2 GROUP 3 GROUP 4
Cohesion:
Conjunction And But Because Firstly

Moreover However Therefore Subsequently

Furthermore Nevertheless Thus Then

In addition In spite of this Consequently Finally

As well Yet So The next day

Cohesion:
Conjunction
Although these fall into Additive Contrastive Causative Sequential
groups, there are
important and sometimes And But Because Firstly
subtle differences
between members of the Moreover However Therefore Subsequently
same group.
Furthermore Nevertheless Thus Then
Are they all appropriate
in the same types of In addition In spite of this Consequently Finally
texts? Are some more
associated with spoken
discourse and others with As well Yet So The next day
written discourse?
Reference
 Cohesion: Reference

 Reference is a device by which a reader (or hearer)

can keep track of various participants in the text
that she reads or hears.

 Pronouns are the most common referential device.

 The word or group of words that a pronoun refers

to is called its antecedent.
Cohesion: There are three types of reference:
Reference
1. Anaphoric reference: using words to point back to
a word used before.

(5) After Lady Gaga appeared at the MTV Music

Video Awards in a dress made completely of meat,
she was criticised by animal rights groups.
Cohesion:
Reference 2. Cataphoric reference: using words that point
forward to a word that has not been used yet.

(6) When she was challenged by reporters, Lady Gaga

insisted that the dress was not intended to offend
anyone.
Cohesion: 3. Exophoric reference: using words that refer to
Reference something outside the text.

(7) If you want to know more about this controversy,

you can read the comments people have left on animal
rights blogs.

(3) Adverts use this device

How pronouns help create atmosphere?
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, opening there,
making sure – a ghostly couple.
‘Here we left it,’ she said. And he added, ‘Oh, but there too!’
‘It’s upstairs,’ she murmured.
‘And in the garden, ‘ he whispered.
‘Quietly,’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them.’
But it wasn’t you that woke us. Oh, no. ‘They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,’ one might say, and so
read on a page or two. ‘Now they’ve found it,’ one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then,
tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood
pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. ‘What did I come in
here for? What did I want to find?’ My hands were empty. ‘Perhaps it’s upstairs then?’ The apples were in the loft.
And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
From ‘A Haunted House’ by Virginia Woolf (1921)
 How do pronouns help create atmosphere?

Interpretation:
• Sense of mystery created by not really knowing who is in the story
• ‘you’ at the start – could be generic you… or it could be speaking directly to you. Does
‘they’ refer to the ghostly couple?
• Who is speaking? We just have ‘he’ and ‘she’.
• Then ‘you’ after the speech seems to be referring to the ghostly couple’
• We don’t know what ‘it’ is.
• In all, the use of pronouns helps to put us as readers in a similar position to the characters –
confused and disorientated.
Substitution
 Cohesion: Substitution

Substitution is the replacing of one word by another.

This is often replacing a long phrase with a shorter one to avoid repetition:

(6) If Lady Gaga was intending to shock people, she succeeding in doing so.

(7) He looked at the potatoes and picked out the large ones.
Ellipsis
Cohesion:
Ellipsis is the omission of a noun, verb or phrase because
Ellipsis it is understood from the context.

(8) Noah: Do you want to see a film tonight

(9) Ali: Yes…

Ellipsis can be used to create a feeling of closeness

between writer and reader.
Lexical Cohesion
Lexical Lexical cohesion is a result of relationships between
Cohesion words.

This might mean just repeating words, or it might

mean using words that are related to the same subject
or ‘lexical field’.

Semantic Field: ‘A group of words that are related in

meaning, normally as a result of being connected with
a particular context of use’ (Carter et al 2012: 262).
Lexical “Lady Gaga, who came under fire recently for
wearing a meat bikini on the cover of Vogue
Cohesion Hommes Japan, wore a raw meat dress at last
night’s VMAs. It was one of many outfits that she
wore throughout the night.”
example
wearing; bikini; Vogue; wore; dress; outfits; wore

These all come from the semantic field of

‘fashion’ and form a lexical chain which helps to
bind the text together.
 Superordinate Fashion
Lexical
Cohesion:
representing a
semantic field
Hyponym bikini Vogue dress outfits
 Different types of texts tend to use different
Texts and 
kinds of cohesive devices.
Cohesive
Devices  For example, advertising uses a lot of repetition
(lexical cohesion) and legal texts avoid using
pronouns, as this can lead to ambiguity.

 Conjunctions are often useful in argumentative

and analytical writing (like essays) to build
connections between ideas and support
arguments.
Bringing it together

 Overall, we want to produce texts that are coherent.

 Cohesive devices are one tool to help us to do this. However, they must be used
appropriately.
 Using a lot of cohesive devices doesn’t necessarily mean that a text is coherent.
 Conversely, a text may be coherent even without cohesive devices.
 Coherence depends on the reader’s interpretation. To write a coherent text we
need to keep both the context of interpretation and the reader’s perspective in
mind.
  Chapter 4 'Paragraphs'. Prose, F. (2006). Reading Like a
Reading Writer. Aurum Press. Available Online.

 Jones, R.H. (2012) Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for

Students. Oxon: Routledge.

 Sections
 B2: Coherence and Cohesion
 B3: All the Right Moves
 C2: Analysing Texture
 C3: Analysing Genres
 D2A: The concept of cohesion.
Further
Reading and
References
Carter et al (2008). Working with Texts: A Core Introduction to
Language Analysis. Oxon.: Routledge.
Halliday, MAK & Hasan R (1976) Cohesion in English. London:
Longman.