[MUSIC] Coherence and cohesion are key ingredients in writing both great essays and great reports. Coherence and cohesion can make a great difference to helping your reader understand your text. If you've ever wrote a text where the grammar and spelling were perfect but it was hard to understand or follow, you've probably experienced what bad coherence and cohesion is like. Thankfully, it's one of the easiest areas of your writing to fix. And by applying a few simple rules and tricks, you can quickly improve these areas. In this lesson, we'll look at what coherence and cohesion are, and how to best deploy them in your writing at university. First, let's look at coherence. Coherence is about whether or not your writing make sense. There are three main aspects to coherence. Firstly, you need to make sure that you have answered all parts of the question and properly understood the question. At university, your assignment prompt is the single most important thing when it comes to your assignments. If you don't understand it, ask someone because there's no easier way to lose marks than to answer the wrong question. The second thing you need to check for in regards to coherence, is how easy your writing is to understand at a sentence level. You need to make sure your sentences are not too long and your grammar is not overly complicated. Sowton points out that many novice academic writers believe complex grammar is necessary in academic writing. When, in fact, it's best to clearly state your main ideas without making your sentences unnecessarily complicated. The third aspect of coherence is that your argument needs to develop logically. Coherence refers to making sure that each idea is expressed and developed with clarity. One way to do this is to ensure that each paragraph or section of your essay or report follows a logical order. Oshima and Hogue identify three of the most common ways to order your writing logically. These are chronological order, logical division of ideas, and comparison and contrast. Firstly, chronological order involves ordering your writing as a sequence of events as they occurred in time. You might use chronological order in the methodology section of a research report to recount your research process, or if you are writing in account of how a patient was treated. Chronological order is rarely used for essays as it lends itself more to a description of what happened rather then critical analysis. The second kind of logical order is a logical division of ideas. This is when a particular topic is broken down into subtopics and then each subtopic is addressed. An example of these kind of logical order could be when you're writing about climate change. You might first divide the topic into causes and effects, then you could further divide the effects according to things like environmental effects, economic effects, and social effects. You would then write about each of the effects in order. The third way that Oshima and Hogue identify to help you audio writing logically is using comparison and contrast. This is when the differences and similarities between two or more things are discussed. You might use this when you are evaluating different proposed solutions. McClure and Wingclub out two important elements when using a comparison contrast structure. The first element is to compare on the same basis. Meaning that you need to consider carefully what you are actually comparing and upon what basis you are making the comparison. The second thing to remember when using a comparison contrast structure is to use the language of comparison. Phrases like similarly or on the other hand indicate to your reader what you are doing in the essay. Let's now move on to cohesion and how it can improve your report or essay. Cohesion refers to how the different parts of your writing, the words, paragraphs and sections that make up your writing work together to form a unified text. This cohesion helps the reader to follow your overall ideas and arguments. Again, there are a few different ways in which this can be achieved. The first is through the use of chains of words. Using the same word, words from the word family but in different forms or through words with similar meanings. Take a moment to read through the following text and think about which words have the same meaning or come from the same word family. We can see a number of word change at work in this example. The repetition of globalization acts as a word chain throughout and connects the sentences to each other, and to the topic of the paragraph as a whole. This repetition of a keyword can act as a kind of cohesion. But we need to be careful that it's not too repetitive. We can also see in this extract that using similar words from a word family can be used as a kind of cohesion. Here we've got different forms of the word economy, economies, economic, economy, and then economies again. Finally, we can use related words to act as word chains and to maintain cohesion. For example, the use of the phrase free trade connects with words like globalization and economy. Also, the words countries and country are related to globalization and economy. Another way to achieve cohesion in your writing is to use pronouns to refer to other parts of the text, both before and after. We can see an example of this in our excerpt, with the use of the word they. They connects this sentence back to the previous one, and its mention of proponents of globalization. Another example of using pronouns to refer to other ideas in the text can be seen with the use of this to refer back to the idea that free trade has become a factor in the economic growth of poorer countries. Thus, cohesion can be achieved by using chains of words from the same word family, using words with similar meanings, and also by using pronouns to refer back to other parts of the text. Another way to improve your writing and make it more cohesive is by understanding the information structure of sentences, using the idea of theme and new. Any sentence can be separated into theme and new. Anything before the verb is theme, and anything after the verb is known as the new. For example, here are two sentences from our sample text with the theme and new indicated. The theme is the starting off point of the sentence and generally relates back to previous information or the main point of the paragraph. The new, as the name suggests, presents information for the first time and builds upon the theme. Manipulation oft he information structure of sentences can assist in cohesion by focusing a paragraph on particular points. We can again say this at work in our example. By looking at what is used here as theme, we can see how the writer has kept the focus on globalization but has become progressively more focused. The excerpt starts with globalization as the theme before focusing in on proponents of globalization. The same theme is more or less repeated with the use of the pronoun they in the next sentence before staying with globalization but moving onto the next benefit in the theme of the following sentence. One final way to achieve cohesion in a paragraph is through the use of words and phrases for conjunction. These are words or phrases that join different sentences or parts of sentences together and express different relationships between ideas. For example, in our example text, firstly and second, indicate to the reader the number of benefits of globalization that will be addressed in the text. Also, the use of in addition helps to create cohesion in the text by signaling to the reader that another point connected to the first point is about to be discussed. These are just some examples of how words and phrases can be used as conjunctions. There are of course many other phrases that can be use to indicate different relationships between sentences and parts of sentences. For example, however and although can indicate contrast, such as and for example can be use to introduce an example. And because or as a result, can be used to to indicate a cause-and-effect relationship. Problems with coherence and cohesion can result in the text that you write being difficult to follow and understand. With just a small few changes however, like the ones we've just outlined, you can work towards producing texts for your assignments that are clear and easy to follow and which are both cohesive and coherent. [MUSIC]
