COHESION
By Greg Dorchies Cohesion, or coherence, is the intangible glue that holds paragraphs together. Having good coherence in a writing project means that your ideas stick together and flow smoothly from one sentence to the next, so that readers of your work can easily understand where you are taking them. Without cohesion, a written work can seem choppy and may not flow well; a lack of coherence challenges the reader and can hurt comprehension, thus rendering your attempt at communication ineffective at best. We will look at cohesion within paragraphs, but the basics below, along with organizational devices like headings, help to link sentences, paragraphs and sections coherently in longer, complex writing projects. Here are four main components of cohesion: relevance order linking words repetition of key words
1. RELEVANCE A simple way to build cohesion or flow between sentences is to look at the meaning of a sentence and compare it to the point of the next sentence. They should be related yet not the same. If the two sentences are not closely related, you will lose the readers‟ attention, because they will have to guess where you are going. If the two sentences are identical, you are not adding any new information to your work, and the reader will be annoyed. Example – Too different: relevance not clear Antigone‟s motivation is family duty, even if it means death. She must rebel which will cause an uproar - the consequences don‟t matter to her. This would also explain why she rejects Ismene‟s support later in the play. They both have different motivations - Ismene has nothing left to lose and wants to go out with a glorious bang. In this paragraph, two sentences are far too separate. The first two sentences talk about Antigone‟s motivations and how far they will drive her. The focus is then redirected to Ismene, and the paragraph focus is not clear. It lacks cohesion. When a sentence relates the Ismene information back to Antigone, we have cohesion:...