24 March 2008¶ Mondays on Writing: Cohesion and Coherence

This week I’m going to fall back on some pretty basic writing techniques, with the goal that I’ll get either more esoteric or more specifically tuned to my needs or more advanced in later weeks1. I still plan to keep up some form of daily writing (M-F) for the foreseeable future. This week I’ll be working on some of the stuff taught by Joseph Williams in his excellent book, Style. I’ve used the book as a text in a couple of classes I’ve taught, and I use his language about cohesion and coherence nearly every time I do any writing instruction. This week, I’m going to review and then apply these basic techniques in a very deliberate manner.

So let’s review. Cohesion and coherence are principles of paragraph construction. In a nutshell, coherence is about ensuring each sentence in a paragraph hangs from the same topic and cohesion is a technique to help readers by putting old information behind new information. This deserves a little more description, but in four hundred words I can’t go much more than vague generalities. Both are best described and identified experientially, but I think there’s some value (for me at least) in discovering a general description that doesn’t use any examples.

So this week I’ll be revising occasional paragraphs (though not necessarily the whole post, simply due to time considerations. Unless I discover that I’m getting really fast at both writing and revising. Which isn’t likely, alas.) Based on my clock right now, it appears that I’ll move from talking about cohesion and coherence to revising for cohesion and coherence tomorrow.

Program note: I’ll be traveling on Wednesday and then out of town for the rest of the week. I’ll try my discipline to get my writing done regardless, but I’m not going to beat myself if I don’t. Presuming I won’t be beating myself up for my nearly inevitable failure, I will be back (ha ha) to my planned schedule next week. But I’ll keep my thoughts happy and positive that I’ll still hit W-Th-F: you think happy, too.

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1 I just noticed how exposed I feel writing about writing techniques. Here I am describing what work I plan to do on my writing, and you can all now see how badly I fail. Perhaps this is a very bad idea. Then again, my fear of exposure is part of my motivation, and so I persist however unwisely, though I do feel like I’m the guy who is not only dumb enough to run naked across the baseball field, but then to yell my name into the television camera afterward.

Comment

  1. Would you mind sending me tips on coherence and cohession?
    Thank you!

    — Girma Megersa · Aug 1, 07:25 AM · #

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