Importance Of Cohesion In Writing

2.7 Cohesion in writing

Cohesion is a very important aspect of academic writing, because it immediately affects the tone of writing. Although some instructors may say that you will not lose points because of grammatical errors in your paper, you may lose points if the tone of your writing is sloppy or too casual (a diary-type of writing or choppy sentences will make the tone of writing too casual for academic writing). But cohesive writing does not mean just “grammatically correct” sentences; cohesive writing refers to the connection of ideas both at the sentence level and at the paragraph level.

2.7.1 Cohesion and Coherence

Until the mid 1970s, cohesion and coherence were often used interchangeably, both referring either to a kind of vague sense of wholeness or to a more specific set of relationships definable grammatically and lexically. The work of Halliday and Hasan (1976) influenced scholars and researchers in rhetoric and composition so that, by the early 1980s, the two terms were distinguished. Cohesion is now understood to be a textual quality, attained through the use of grammatical and lexical elements that enable readers to perceive semantic relationships within and between sentences. Coherence refers to the overall consistency of a discourse--its purpose, voice, content, style, form, and so on--and is in part determined by readers ' perceptions of texts, dependent not only on linguistic and contextual information in the texts but also on readers ' abilities