Lesson Five 
Cohesion and Coherence 

Local Issue: what makes a  sentence clear? 
Global Issue: what makes a paragraph clear? 

I: 
Cohesion: flow of thought in a paragraph. 
Connecting a  sentence to the one before and the one after. 

Principles: 
Begin sentences with old information, 
ideas that the reader will recognize since they have seen them before, 
or because they are familiar from  the context. 

End sentences  with new information,
ideas that the reader cannot anticipate, or ideas that are 
difficult to understand. E.g. of latter: detailed lists, 
new technical words, complex conditions. 

Artifical cohesion vs. organic cohesion: 
Too many uses of `but', `furthermore', `hence', `since'
may be an attempt to create artificial cohesion
in an incoherent passage. 

II Coherence:  

Topic of a sentence: what a sentence is about,
its psychological subject, not necess. its grammatical subject. 

It is impossible for these results to be consistent.

P.Subj: these results G. Subj: It 

Readers can impose a sense of coherence on a passage when: 
they are  able to identify  topics quickly and easily.
they are  able to see that a string of topics form a logical set. 

Diagnosis: 
read the first few words of each sentence in a para
will the reader see a concise series of topics? 
will the reader  see few connections between the topics? 

Rx: 
--Decide globally what a passage is about by choosing a title 
for it with three or four nouns: these will provide the topics. 
--In most sentences, signal those topics by making them the 
subjects of sentences
--locate the topics towards the beginning of the sentences 
--avoid monotony by using different words for the topics: 
pronoun, as the object of a prepositional phrase, paraphrase, 
a whole clause that stands for the topic, etc. 

System: 

Fixed:    Topic 
Variable: familiar     unfamiliar information  

III: Opening a sentence well

1. Avoid long introductory clauses ``throat-clearing''
2. Revise nominalizations that begin sentences
3. Choose passive when needed to locate the topic at the beginning 
of the sentence. 

Themes: 
Consider  central concepts of a passage, repeated in a para.
when they appear at the beginning of sentences, usually as 
nouns in subjects:  topics.  
At other locations: themes.