Traci Grant's Grammar Tutorial - Cohesion

(The images under google search of "writing cohesion" were really really boring, so I'm using this one because it's fun!)

COHESION

“It doesn’t flow. It’s just awkward. It doesn’t feel right. The words don’t go together. It’s confusing. I get what you’re saying but say it differently maybe?”

Okay, stop. How many of you have heard this before, either in high school or in college or at your job?

People (or readers in this case) know when something is off in a document. They know because, for some reason, people (or writers in this case) try to write in a different way than they talk. You don’t necessarily have to do that.

We talk more fluidly than we write which means that we will do things differently when we write. When we write, we stop to think of what to say and write something that sounds “better” than the way we speak. But you have to understand that when you’re having a conversation, everyone in the conversation gets it (or so you hope; there’s always that one guy that say, “Oh hey, you’re talking about chickens. I saw this cool bug once.”) and so you don’t need to use complete sentences or proper grammar (but omg please please speak with proper grammar!).

So as a writer, you have to do the same thing as when you write. But your writing sounds bad? That does not make you a bad writer because you can write. If you can speak, you can write.

The problems that come from writing aren’t because you are a bad writer or you aren’t using complete sentences or proper grammar. It's all based in the meaning of what you're writing. You have to make sure that your reader is following your meaning (and you can use sentence fragments and break grammar rules to help convey your meaning). You have to make the reader understand what you want them to understand. Just because what you are writing is clear in your own head doesn’t mean it’s automatically clear to your readers. The problem is that meaning is not immediate like it is in a conversation. That doesn’t mean you have to write differently than you speak, you just have to use different tools to help convey your meaning.

Cohesion is the most basic tool that will help you convey your meaning to your readers. Cohesion is how the words on the page work together to create meaning and keep confusion at bay. Cohesion is taught in high schools and in some college classes as “signposting” through the use of transitions. This is a great way to create cohesion on a full document level. But cohesion is useful at more than just the full document level. Your sentences and your paragraphs need to be cohesive too.

Here are some tips on how to create cohesion throughout your entire document.

Word Level
Pronouns

Using pronouns effectively is a great way to keep yourself from repeating the same thing and to shorten your word count. You can take a long subject and shove it into two letters. Look back at that sentence and see what I did. I could have said. “You can take a long subject and shove the long subject into two letters.” Instead, I used a pronoun.

Be careful though because while pronouns can create comprehension, they can also create confusion.

Tommy wasn’t sure what his dad was doing. His face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

“his dad” creates a relationship that would not be there had I used a name. (ie: Tommy wasn’t sure what Charles was doing.) This use of a possessive pronoun creates meaning.

In the second sentence, even though we are using pronouns to cut down on redundancy and word count, “His” and “he” do not signify who they are referring to. Was the dad’s face scrunched up? Or Tommy’s? Is Tommy staring at the garage? Or is his dad?

Tommy wasn’t sure what his dad was doing. His dad’s face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

If you don’t want to repeat his dad, rework the sentence:
Tommy wasn’t sure what was going on. His dad’s face was scrunched up, and he was staring at the garage.

That is much clearer on who is doing what in these sentences.

Sentence Level
Parallelism

Parallelism is where different parts of a sentence or a list are in the same grammatical form.

Traveling is a pastime for many people who want to go around the world and saw different people and learning about other cultures.

This is not parallel because the list of items are not in the same grammatical form. We get the meaning of this sentence, but it takes more time (maybe a few nanoseconds but really, who has time to spare?) to figure out because of the sentence structure.

Traveling is a pastime for many people who want to go around the world, see different people, and learn about other cultures.

Here is another example using a bulleted list.

Billy’s Days of Fun and Recreation allows visitors to do a number of exciting activities, including the following:
-fish
-to go on hikes
-boating
-ride your bike
-relax in large campsites
-ATVs

Because the items on the list are not in the same grammatical form, it looks messy. This is a professional document, Billy’s website or a flyer that he passes out in parking lots begging for business. He wants it to look professional and be easy to read, so he has to make the items on the list parallel.

Billy’s Days of Fun and Recreation allows visitors to do a number of exciting activities, including the following:
-fishing
-hiking
-boating
-biking
-riding ATVs
-relaxing in large campsites

The second one has everything in the list in the same grammatical form so it is easier to read.

Also, Billy changed the order of his list. For some reason that I’m sure a psychologist could explain to you, everything sounds better in a list when the longest one is at the end. Read these two sentences and you’ll see what I mean.

Grandma is good at baking, doing crossword puzzles, and knitting scarves.
Grandma is good at baking, knitting scarves, and doing crossword puzzles.

There’s nothing different in the meaning, but the way the mind reads, the second one is almost poetic. It’s just the way that English language users read a sentence. Again, I can’t explain it.

Practice Parallelism with these Examples
1. It makes me feel better and fortunately.
2. They are expensive in that they cost both money and you spend time on them.
3. Tickets cost $4 for adults and $3 for children's tickets.
4. Last Saturday, there was a riot when the band quit early and the cops will arrive.
5. I went to the store, shopping at the mall, and watched a movie with my friends.
6. Yesterday, angels were dancing on a pin, the oceans all had been changed to lemonade, and the skies turned purple.

End Emphasis

This is just as it implies: put the important stuff at the end of the sentence. Readers will remember what is at the end of a sentence more than the stuff at the beginning.

(Disclaimer: The following sentence in no way reflects this author’s economic viewpoint. She just copied and pasted it from some crazy person's blog.)

The US has created a grand total of $6.3 trillion in trade debt in just a short 10 year time span – money that can only come back to buy us out!

The last part of this sentence, from a doomsayer’s blog, wants you to understand that if other countries try to collect on this trade debt the US is going to DIE!

Yeah, that is end emphasis. You won’t remember that dollar amount or how many years it has been, but you will remember that we’re going to DIE!

End emphasis is also a good skill for document level cohesion. The last sentence of a document is not only what ties everything together, but it will also be the thing your reader remembers the most. So no pressure on that last sentence. None at all.

Paragraph Level
Given-new Contract

This contract relies on the fact that readers expect to know information that has already been given in a sentence or a paragraph. You give them information they know at the beginning of the sentence, and then give them new information at the end. Using pronouns is also a great way to use the given-new contract.

There are many ways that you can conserve energy. An obvious one is to turn off lights and electronics. One that isn’t as obvious is unplugging unused chargers. Even though nothing is charging, people don’t realize that there is energy flowing through the outlet.

In the second sentence, “one” refers to the “many ways” that was given in the first sentence. The new information in this sentence is the example. In the third sentence, “one” again refers to “many ways”, and “isn’t as obvious” goes back to the “obvious” in the second sentence. The new information is “unplugging chargers”.

Can you find the given and new information in the last sentence?

Document Level
Stock transitions and signposting

There are so many ways that you can do this that I will not list them all here. But they have different functions: to add or show sequence, to compare, to contrast, to give examples, to intensify, to indicate place, to indicate time, to repeat, to summarize, to conclude, and to show cause and effect. A few examples are also, after all, immediately, altogether, as a result, because, however, before, first, finally and meanwhile.

But be cautious. Do not use “First, Second, Third, Finally” (or any other very similar stock transitions) as the first word in all your paragraphs. This creates redundancy which is not just a using-the-same-word-too-much issue. You can also create redundancy in your document arrangement.

A Entire Paragraph Example

In my classroom, I give my students the following paragraph and ask them to make it more cohesive.

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging. There are a lot of different ways to add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, repeating important points and also pronouns are helpful in creating cohesion. Many times, students come to a writing class without knowing what cohesion is. Their previous teachers don’t know what cohesion is and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or the paragraphs flow awkwardly. Using some of these ideas will help. When you don’t even know what “cohesive” means it can be especially challenging.

The meaning behind this paragraph is clear, but there are definitely some problems that will make it even easier for the reader to get the point. What would you do to this to make it more cohesive?

Many students say that they should just reorder the sentences. But when you only reorder the sentences, there is a lot of confusion and redundancy, and the sentence level problems have not been fixed.

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging. When you don’t even know what “cohesive” means it can be especially challenging. Many times, students come to a writing class without knowing what cohesion is. Their previous teachers don’t know what cohesion is and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or the paragraphs flow awkwardly. There are a lot of different ways to add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, repeating similar effects with parallelism and also pronouns are helpful in creating cohesion. Using some of these ideas will help.

Here are the following steps that you should use to make this into a more cohesive paragraph:
-Put similar information next to each other (reorder the sentences).
-Use the given-new contract and pronouns to get rid of redundancy.
-Use parallelism to create sentences that are easier to read.
-Delete any unnecessary information and rewrite sentences.

Here is a more cohesive paragraph (maybe not perfect, because the second sentence is pretty long, but it works for this example):

Writing a cohesive paragraph is challenging especially when you don’t even know what “cohesive” means. Many times, students come to a writing class without this knowledge, because their previous teachers don’t know either and have only told them that their sentences are awkward or their paragraphs don’t flow. There are a lot of different ways to help add cohesion to your words. You can use the given-new contract, parallelism and pronouns.

Can you see all the changes that were made?

I hope you found this brief tutorial helpful! I also hope that you automatically do a lot of this and just never knew there were actually tricks to writing well. If I continue to have time through the semester, I will put up more tutorials on how to use sentence patterns and sentence variety to your advantage, and how to create sentence clarity with word choice and punctuation.