what is the meaning of coherent essay

Table of Contents

Ai, ethics & human agency, collaboration, information literacy, writing process, coherence – how to achieve coherence in writing.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - University of South Florida

Coherence refers to a style of writing where ideas, themes, and language connect logically, consistently, and clearly to guide the reader's understanding. By mastering coherence , alongside flow , inclusiveness , simplicity,  and unity , you'll be well-equipped to craft professional or academic pieces that engage and inform effectively. Acquire the skills to instill coherence in your work and discern it in the writings of others.

What is Coherence?

Coherence in writing refers to the logical connections and consistency that hold a text together, making it understandable and meaningful to the reader. Writers create coherence in three ways:

• logical consistency
• conceptual consistency
• linguistic consistency.

What is Logical Consistency?

• For instance, if they argue, “If it rains, the ground gets wet,” and later state, “It’s raining but the ground isn’t wet,” without additional explanation, this represents a logical inconsistency.

What is Conceptual Consistency?

• For example, if you are writing an essay arguing that regular exercise has multiple benefits for mental health, each paragraph should introduce and discuss a different benefit of exercise, all contributing to your main argument. Including a paragraph discussing the nutritional value of various foods, while interesting, would break the conceptual consistency, as it doesn’t directly relate to the benefits of exercise for mental health.

What is Linguistic Consistency?

• For example, if a writer jumps erratically between different tenses or switches point of view without clear demarcation, the reader might find it hard to follow the narrative, leading to a lack of linguistic coherence.

Related Concepts: Flow ; Given to New Contract ; Grammar ; Organization ; Organizational Structures ; Organizational Patterns ; Sentence Errors

Why Does Coherence Matter?

Coherence is crucial in writing as it ensures that the text is understandable and that the ideas flow logically from one to the next. When writing is coherent, readers can easily follow the progression of ideas, making the content more engaging and easier to comprehend. Coherence connects the dots for the reader, linking concepts, arguments, and details in a clear, logical manner.

Without coherence, even the most interesting or groundbreaking ideas can become muddled and lose their impact. A coherent piece of writing keeps the reader’s attention, demonstrates the writer’s control over their subject matter, and can effectively persuade, inform, or entertain. Thus, coherence contributes significantly to the effectiveness of writing in achieving its intended purpose.

How Do Writers Create Coherence in Writing?

• Your thesis statement serves as the guiding star of your paper. It sets the direction and focus, ensuring all subsequent points relate back to this central idea.
• Acknowledge and address potential counterarguments to strengthen your position and add depth to your writing.
• Use the genres and organizational patterns appropriate for your rhetorical situation . A deductive structure (general to specific) is often effective, guiding the reader logically through your argument. Yet different disciplines may privilege more inductive approaches , such as law and philosophy.
• When following a given-to-new order, writers move from what the reader already knows to new information. In formal or persuasive contexts, writers are careful to vet new information for the reader following information literacy laws and conventions .
• Strategic repetition of crucial terms and your thesis helps your readers follow your main ideas and evidence for claims 
• While repetition is useful, varying language with synonyms can prevent redundancy and keep the reader engaged.
• Parallelism in sentences can provide rhythm and clarity, making complex ideas easier to follow.
• Consistent use of pronouns avoids confusion and helps in maintaining a clear line of thought.
• Arrange your ideas in a sequence that naturally builds from one point to the next, ensuring each paragraph flows smoothly into the next .
• Signposting , or using phrases that indicate what’s coming next or what just happened, can help orient the reader within your argument.
• Don’t bother repeating your argument in your conclusion. Prioritize conciseness. Yet end with a call to action or appeal to kairos and ethos .

Recommended Resources

• Organization
• Organizational Patterns

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence - How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Flow - How to Create Flow in Writing

Inclusivity - Inclusive Language

The Elements of Style - The DNA of Powerful Writing

Suggested Edits

• Please select the purpose of your message. * - Corrections, Typos, or Edits Technical Support/Problems using the site Advertising with Writing Commons Copyright Issues I am contacting you about something else
• Your full name
• Your email address *
• Page URL needing edits *
• Comments This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Other Topics:

Citation - Definition - Introduction to Citation in Academic & Professional Writing

• Joseph M. Moxley

Explore the different ways to cite sources in academic and professional writing, including in-text (Parenthetical), numerical, and note citations.

Collaboration - What is the Role of Collaboration in Academic & Professional Writing?

Collaboration refers to the act of working with others or AI to solve problems, coauthor texts, and develop products and services. Collaboration is a highly prized workplace competency in academic...

Genre may reference a type of writing, art, or musical composition; socially-agreed upon expectations about how writers and speakers should respond to particular rhetorical situations; the cultural values; the epistemological assumptions...

Grammar refers to the rules that inform how people and discourse communities use language (e.g., written or spoken English, body language, or visual language) to communicate. Learn about the rhetorical...

Information Literacy - Discerning Quality Information from Noise

Information Literacy refers to the competencies associated with locating, evaluating, using, and archiving information. In order to thrive, much less survive in a global information economy — an economy where information functions as a...

Mindset refers to a person or community’s way of feeling, thinking, and acting about a topic. The mindsets you hold, consciously or subconsciously, shape how you feel, think, and act–and...

Rhetoric: Exploring Its Definition and Impact on Modern Communication

Learn about rhetoric and rhetorical practices (e.g., rhetorical analysis, rhetorical reasoning,  rhetorical situation, and rhetorical stance) so that you can strategically manage how you compose and subsequently produce a text...

Style, most simply, refers to how you say something as opposed to what you say. The style of your writing matters because audiences are unlikely to read your work or...

The Writing Process - Research on Composing

The writing process refers to everything you do in order to complete a writing project. Over the last six decades, researchers have studied and theorized about how writers go about...

Writing Studies

Writing studies refers to an interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers who study writing. Writing studies also refers to an academic, interdisciplinary discipline – a subject of study. Students in...

Featured Articles

Academic Writing – How to Write for the Academic Community

Professional Writing – How to Write for the Professional World

Credibility & Authority – How to Be Credible & Authoritative in Speech & Writing

Cohesion And Coherence In Essay Writing

Table of contents, introduction.

Coherent essays are identified by relevance to the central topic. They communicate a meaningful message to a specific audience and maintain pertinence to the main focus. In a coherent essay, the sentences and ideas flow smoothly and, as a result, the reader can follow the ideas developed without any issues.

To achieve coherence in an essay, writers use lexical and grammatical cohesive devices. Examples of these cohesive devices are repetition, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy, substitutions , and anaphoric or cataphoric relations between sentences. We will discuss these devices in more detail below.

This article will discuss how to write a coherent essay. We will be focusing on the five major points.

• We will start with definitions of coherence and cohesion.
• Then, we will give examples of how a text can achieve cohesion.
• We will see how a text can be cohesive but not coherent.
• The structure of a coherent essay will also be discussed.
• Finally, we will look in detail at ways to improve cohesion and write a coherent essay.

Before illustrating how to write coherent essays, let us start with the definitions of coherence and cohesion and list the ways we can achieve cohesion in a coherent text.

Definitions Cohesion and Coherence

In general, coherence and cohesion refer to how a text is structured so that the elements it is constituted of can stick together and contribute to a meaningful whole. In coherent essays, writers use grammatical and lexical cohesive techniques so that ideas can flow meaningfully and logically.

What is coherence?

Coherence refers to the quality of forming a unified consistent whole. We can describe a text as being coherent if it is semantically meaningful, that is if the ideas flow logically to produce an understandable entity.

If a text is coherent it is logically ordered and connected. It is clear, consistent, and understandable.

Coherence is related to the macro-level features of a text which enable it to have a sense as a whole.

What is cohesion?

Cohesion is commonly defined as the grammatical and lexical connections that tie a text together, contributing to its meaning (i.e. coherence.)

While coherence is related to the macro-level features of a text, cohesion is concerned with its micro-level – the words, the phrases, and the sentences and how they are connected to form a whole.

If the elements of a text are cohesive, they are united and work together or fit well together.

To summarize, coherence refers to how the ideas of the text flow logically and make a text semantically meaningful as a whole. Cohesion is what makes the elements (e.g. the words, phrases, clauses, and sentences) of a text stick together to form a whole.

How to Achieve Cohesion And Coherence In Essay Writing

There are two types of cohesion: lexical and grammatical. Writers connect sentences and ideas in their essays using both lexical and grammatical cohesive devices.

Lexical cohesion

We can achieve cohesion through lexical cohesion by using these techniques:

• Repetition.

Now let’s look at these in more detail.

Repeating words may contribute to cohesion. Repetition creates cohesive ties within the text.

• Birds are beautiful. I like birds.

You can use a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word to achieve cohesion.

• Paul saw a snake under the mattress. The serpent was probably hiding there for a long time.

Antonymy refers to the use of a word of opposite meaning. This is often used to create links between the elements of a text.

• Old movies are boring, the new ones are much better.

This refers to the use of a word that denotes a subcategory of a more general class.

• I saw a cat . The animal was very hungry and looked ill.

Relating a superordinate term (i.e. animal) to a corresponding subordinate term (i.e. cat) may create more cohesiveness between sentences and clauses.

Meronymy is another way to achieve cohesion. It refers to the use of a word that denotes part of something but which is used to refer to the whole of it for instance faces can be used to refer to people as in “I see many faces here”. In the following example, hands refer to workers.

• More workers are needed. We need more hands to finish the work.

Grammatical cohesion

Grammatical cohesion refers to the grammatical relations between text elements. This includes the use of:

• Cataphora .
• Substitutions.
• Conjunctions and transition words.

Let us illustrate the above devices with some examples.

Anaphora is when you use a word referring back to another word used earlier in a text or conversation.

• Jane was brilliant. She got the best score.

The pronoun “she” refers back to the proper noun “Jane”.

Cataphora is the opposite of anaphora. Cataphora refers to the use of a word or phrase that refers to or stands for a following word or phrase.

• Here he comes our hero. Please, welcome John .

The pronoun “he” refers back to the proper noun “John”.

Ellipsis refers to the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.

• Liz had some chocolate bars, and Nancy an ice cream.

In the above example, “had” in “Nancy an ice cream” is left because it can be understood (or presupposed) as it was already mentioned previously in the sentence.

Elliptic elements can be also understood from the context as in:

• A: Where are you going?

Substitutions

Substitutions refer to the use of a word to replace another word.

• A: Which T-shirt would you like?
• B: I would like the pink one .

Conjunctions transition words

Conjunctions and transition words are parts of speech that connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences.

• Examples of conjunctions: but, or, and, although, in spite of, because,
• Examples of transition words: however, similarly, likewise, specifically, consequently, for this reason, in contrast to, accordingly, in essence, chiefly, finally.

Here are some examples:

• I called Tracy and John.
• He was tired but happy.
• She likes neither chocolates nor cookies.
• You can either finish the work or ask someone to do it for you.
• He went to bed after he had done his homework.
• Although she is very rich, she isn’t happy.
• I was brought up to be responsible. Similarly , I will try to teach my kids how to take responsibility for their actions.

Cohesive but not coherent texts

Sometimes, a text may be cohesively connected, yet may still be incoherent.

Learners may wrongly think that simply linking sentences together will lead to a coherent text.

Here is an example of a text in which sentences are cohesively connected, yet the overall coherence is lacking:

The player threw the ball toward the goalkeeper. Balls are used in many sports. Most balls are spheres, but American football is an ellipsoid. Fortunately, the goalkeeper jumped to catch the ball. The crossbar in the soccer game is made of iron. The goalkeeper was standing there.

The sentences and phrases in the above text are decidedly cohesive but not coherent.

There is a use of:

• Repetition of: the ball, goalkeeper, the crossbar.
• Conjunctions and transition words: but, fortunately.

The use of the above cohesive devices does not result in a meaningful and unified whole. This is because the writer presents material that is unrelated to the topic. Why should a writer talk about what the crossbar is made of? And is talking about the form balls in sports relevant in this context? What is the central focus of the text?

A coherent essay has to be cohesively connected and logically expressive of the central topic.

How to write a coherent essay?

1. start with an outline.

An outline is the general plan of your essays. It contains the ideas you will include in each paragraph and the sequence in which these ideas will be mentioned.

It is important to have an outline before starting to write. Spending a few minutes on the outline can be rewarding. An outline will organize your ideas and the end product can be much more coherent.

Here is how you can outline your writing so that you can produce a coherent essay:

• Start with the thesis statement – the sentence that summarizes the topic of your writing.
• Brainstorm the topic for a few minutes. Write down all the ideas related to the topic.
• Sift the ideas brainstormed in the previous step to identify only the ideas worth including in your essay.
• Organize ideas in a logical order so that your essay reflects the unified content that you want to communicate.
• Each idea has to be treated in a separate paragraph.
• Think of appropriate transitions between the different ideas.
• Under each idea/paragraph, write down enough details to support your idea.

After identifying and organizing your ideas into different paragraphs, they have to fit within the conventional structure of essays.

2. Structure your essay

It is also important to structure your essay so that you the reader can identify the organization of the different parts of your essay and how each paragraph leads to the next one.

Here is a structure of an essay

3. Structure your paragraphs

Paragraphs have to be well-organized. The structure of each paragraph should have:

• A topic sentence that is usually placed at the beginning,
• Supporting details that give further explanation of the topic sentence,
• And a concluding sentence that wraps up the content of the paragraph.

The supporting sentences in each paragraph must flow smoothly and logically to support the purpose of the topic sentence. Similarly, each paragraph has to serve the thesis statement, the main topic of the essay.

4. Relevance to the main topic

No matter how long the essay is, we should make sure that we stick to the topic we want to talk about. Coherence is about making everything flow smoothly to create unity. So, sentences and ideas must be relevant to the central thesis statement.

The writer has to maintain the flow of ideas to serve the main focus of the essay.

5. Stick to the purpose of the type of essay you’re-writing

Essays must be clear and serve a purpose and direction. This means that the writer’s thoughts must not go astray in developing the purpose of the essay.

Essays are of different types and have different purposes. Accordingly, students have to stick to the main purpose of each genre of writing.

• An expository essay aims to inform, describe, or explain a topic, using essential facts to teach the reader about a topic.
• A descriptive essay intends to transmit a detailed description of a person, event, experience, or object. The aim is to make the reader perceive what is being described.
• A narrative essay attempts to tell a story that has a purpose. Writers use storytelling techniques to communicate an experience or an event.
• In argumentative essays, writers present an objective analysis of the different arguments about a topic and provide an opinion or a conclusion of positive or negative implications. The aim is to persuade the reader of your point.

6. Use cohesive devices and signposting phrases

Sentences should be connected using appropriate cohesive devices as discussed above:

Cohesive devices such as conjunctions and transition words are essential in providing clarity to your essay. But we can add another layer of clarity to guide the reader throughout the essay by using signpost signals.

What is signposting in writing?

Signposting refers to the use of phrases or words that guide readers to understand the direction of your essay. An essay should take the reader on a journey throughout the argumentation or discussion. In that journey, the paragraphs are milestones. Using signpost signals assists the reader in identifying where you want to guide them. Signposts serve to predict what will happen, remind readers of where they are at important stages along the process, and show the direction of your essay.

Essay signposting phrases

The following are some phrases you can use to signpost your writing:

It should be noted though that using cohesive devices or signposting language may not automatically lead to a coherent text. Some texts can be highly cohesive but remain incoherent. Appropriate cohesion and signposting are essential to coherence but they are not enough. To be coherent, an essay has to follow, in addition to using appropriate cohesive devices, all the tips presented in this article.

7. Draft, revise, and edit

After preparing the ground for the essay, students produce their first draft. This is the first version of the essay. Other subsequent steps are required.

The next step is to revise the first draft to rearrange, add, or remove paragraphs, ideas, sentences, or words.

The questions that must be addressed are the following:

• Is the essay clear? Is it meaningful? Does it serve the thesis statement (the main topic)?
• Are there sufficient details to convey ideas?
• Are there any off-topic ideas that you have to do without?
• Have you included too much information? Does your writing stray off-topic?
• Do the ideas flow in a logical order?
• Have you used appropriate cohesive devices and transition words when needed?

Once the revision is done, it is high time for the editing stage. Editing involves proofreading and correcting mistakes in grammar and mechanics. Pay attention to:

• Verb tense.
• Subject-verb agreement.
• Sentence structure. Have you included a subject a verb and an object (if the verb is transitive.)
• Punctuation.
• Capitalization.

Coherent essays are identified by relevance to the thesis statement. The ideas and sentences of coherent essays flow smoothly. One can follow the ideas discussed without any problems. Lexical and grammatical cohesive devices are used to achieve coherence. However, these devices are not sufficient. To maintain relevance to the main focus of the text, there is a need for a whole process of collecting ideas, outlining, reviewing, and editing to create a coherent whole.

More writing lessons are here .

Related Pages:

• Figures of speech
• Articles about writing

Achieving coherence

“A piece of writing is coherent when it elicits the response: ‘I follow you. I see what you mean.’ It is incoherent when it elicits the response: ‘I see what you're saying here, but what has it got to do with the topic at hand or with what you just told me above?’ ” - Johns, A.M

Transitions

Parallelism, challenge task, what is coherence.

Coherence in a piece of writing means that the reader can easily understand it. Coherence is about making everything flow smoothly. The reader can see that everything is logically arranged and connected, and relevance to the central focus of the essay is maintained throughout.

Repetition in a piece of writing does not always demonstrate cohesion.   Study these sentences:

So, how does repetition as a cohesive device work?

When a pronoun is used, sometimes what the pronoun refers to (ie, the referent) is not always clear. Clarity is achieved by  repeating a key noun or synonym . Repetition is a cohesive device used deliberately to improve coherence in a text.

In the following text, decide ifthe referent for the pronoun  it   is clear. Otherwise, replace it  with the key noun English  where clarity is needed.

Click here to view the revised text.

Suggested improvement

English has almost become an international language. Except for Chinese, more people speak it (clear reference; retain)  than any other language. Spanish is the official language of more countries in the world, but more countries have English ( it is replaced with a key noun) as their official or unofficial second language. More than 70% of the world's mail is written in English ( it is replaced with a key noun).  It (clear reference; retain) is the primary language on the Internet.

Sometimes, repetition of a key noun is preferred even when the reference is clear. In the following text, it is clear that it  refers to the key noun gold , but when used throughout the text, the style becomes monotonous.

Improved text: Note where the key noun gold is repeated. The deliberate repetition creates interest and adds maturity to the writing style.

Gold , a precious metal, is prized for two important characteristics. First of all, gold has a lustrous beauty that is resistant to corrosion. Therefore, it is suitable for jewellery, coins and ornamental purposes. Gold never needs to be polished and will remain beautiful forever. For example, a Macedonian coin remains as untarnished today as the day it was made 23 centuries ago. Another important characteristic of gold is its usefulness to industry and science. For many years, it has been used in hundreds of industrial applications. The most recent use of gold is in astronauts’ suits. Astronauts wear gold -plated shields when they go outside spaceships in space. In conclusion, gold is treasured not only for its beauty but also its utility.

Pronoun + Repetition of key noun

Sometimes, greater cohesion can be achieved by using a pronoun followed by an appropriate key noun or synonym (a word with a similar meaning).

Transitions are like traffic signals. They guide the reader from one idea to the next. They signal a range of relationships between sentences, such as comparison, contrast, example and result. Click here for a more comprehensive list of Transitions (Logical Organisers) .

Test yourself: How well do you understand transitions?

Which of the three alternatives should follow the transition or logical organiser in capital letters to complete the second sentence?

Using transitions/logical organisers

Improve the coherence of the following paragraph by adding transitions in the blank spaces. Use the italicised hint in brackets to help you choose an apporpriate transition for each blank. If you need to, review the list of Transitions (Logical Organisers)   before you start.

Using transitions

Choose the most appropriate transition from the options given to complete the article:

Overusing transitions

While the use of appropriate transitions can improve coherence (as the previous practice activity shows), it can also be counterproductive if transitions are overused. Use transitions carefully to enhance and clarify the logical connection between ideas in extended texts. Write a range of sentences and vary sentence openings. 

Study the following examples:

Identifying cohesive devices

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

5 Coherent Paragraphs

When you think about it, there’s no contradiction in the advice of these two American writers. You should respond with genuine feeling and without inhibition to what stimulates you – in our case, a set of texts. But feeling isn’t enough. When Gustave Flaubert asked “Has a drinking song ever been written by a drunken man?” he meant a coherent song. Between “getting it down” and “handing it in” good writers show respect for their readers by organizing their material into recognizable patterns. An important benefit of this is that by distancing yourself from your ideas and putting them in order for your reader, you are forced to shape your own nebulous feelings into clear thoughts.

This brings us to the well-known (but apparently not well enough known) paragraph: the basic unit of composition. The traditional and still useful rule that a paragraph must have unity, coherence, and emphasis only means that it must make sense, that the sentences should fit together smoothly, and that not all the sentences function in the same way.

When you see that its purpose is to support your thesis by developing and connecting your ideas meaningfully, then paragraph structure should appeal to your common sense. As a point of emphasis a topic sentence – whether you choose to put it at the beginning, middle, or end – allows you to control your writing and guide your reader by expressing the main idea of the paragraph. Remember, you’re not writing a mystery novel. There will be relatively few instances in this type of essay when you’ll want to surprise your reader.

Must every paragraph have a topic sentence? Not necessarily: if the main idea is obvious, then a topic sentence may be omitted. But even if it is only implied by your paragraph, you and your reader should be able to state easily the main idea . Whether explicit or implicit, the topic sentence of each of your paragraphs should come out of your thesis statement and lead to your conclusion. Like the paragraph, the whole essay should have unity, coherence, and emphasis. Try this: next time you read an essay, underline only the topic sentences of each paragraph; then reread only what you’ve underlined. In many cases you’ll see that the underlined sentences make up a coherent paragraph all by themselves (this is an easy way to write an abstract, incidentally). That’s because most topic sentences are more specific than the thesis statement that generates them, but still more general than the supporting sentences in the paragraphs that illustrate them. Thus they are transitions between the writer’s promise to the reader and the keeping of that promise.

Examples: Opening Paragraphs

From a student essay discussing Kafka’s The Metamorphosis :

When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he did so with an air of optimism. No longer could man be led about on the tight leash of religion; a man liberated could strive for the status of Overman. But what happens if a man refuses to let go of his “dead” God and remains too fearful to evolve into an Overman? Rejecting the concept of the Christian God means renouncing the scapegoat for the sins of man and accepting responsibility for one’s own actions. In The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa plays the god-like role of financial provider for his family. However, when his transformation renders him useless in this role, the rest of Samsa’s family undergoes a change of its own: Kafka uses the metamorphoses of both Gregor and his family to illustrate a modern crisis.

Some comments on the structure:   Two provocative introductory sentences, then a transition question and a response that presents the central idea of the essay. Next, introduction of the text and characters under discussion. Finally, the topic sentence of the paragraph, which, as the thesis statement, promises an interpretation. A paragraph such as this engages the reader’s interest right away and makes the reader look forward to the rest of the essay.

From a student essay on the question, “What Do Historians of Childhood Do?”

In his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood , Neil Postman argues that the concept of childhood is a recent invention of literate society, enabled by the invention of moveable-type printing. Postman says as a result of television, literate adulthood and preliterate childhood are both vanishing. While Postman’s indictment of TV-culture is provocative, he ignores race, class, ideology, and economic circumstance as factors in the experience of both children and adults. Worse, he ignores history, making sweeping generalizations such as the claim that the pre-modern Greeks had no concept of children. These claims are contradicted by the appearance of children in classical Greek literature and in the Christian Gospels, written in Greek, which admonish their readers to “be as children.” A more useful and much more interesting observation might be that the idea of childhood and the experience of young people has changed significantly since ancient times, and continues to change.

Some comments on the structure:   Like the previous example, this essay begins with a statement from a text (this time with a paraphrase rather than a quotation) and builds towards a thesis statement. In this case the build-up, where the writer disagrees with one of the class texts, is stronger than the thesis. The writer has not stated exactly what he will argue, aside from saying he finds at least some of the ideas of childhood advanced in the course materials unsatisfactory. Keeping the reader in suspense may add to the interest of the essay, but in a short paper it might also waste valuable time and leave the reader unsure whether the writer has really thought things through.

From an essay on Crime and Punishment :

“Freedom depends upon the real…It is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling” (Colin Wilson, The Outsider, p. 39). Even without God, modern man is still tempted to create unreal worlds. In Feodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov conceives the fantastic theory of the “overman.” After committing murder in an attempt to satisfy his theory, Raskolnikov falls into a delirious, death-like state; then, Lazarus-like, he is raised from the “dead.” His “resurrection” is not, as some critics suggest, a consequence of his love for Sonya and Sonya’s God. Rather, his salvation results from the freedom he gains when he chooses to live without illusions.

Comments: Once more, a stimulating opening. Between the first and last sentences, which frame the paragraph (the last one, as well as being the thesis sentence, is the specific application of the general first sentence), the writer makes her transition to the central idea and introduces the text and character she wishes to discuss. The reader is given enough information to know what to expect. It promises to be an interesting essay.

Each of the writers above chooses to open with a quotation or reference that helps to focus the reader’s attention and reveal the point of view from which a specific interpretation will be made. Movement from the general to the specific is very common in introductory thesis paragraphs, but it is not obligatory. You can begin with your thesis statement as the first sentence; start with a question; or use the entire opening paragraph to set the scene and provide background, then present your thesis in the second paragraph. Make choices and even create new options, so long as your sentences move to create a dominant impression on the reader.

Examples: Middle Paragraphs

From a student essay comparing P’u Sung-ling’s (17th century) The Cricket Boy and Franz Kafka’s (20th century) The Metamorphosis , two stories that deal with a son’s relationship to his family. (The writer’s thesis: according to these authors, one must connect in meaningful ways with other human beings in order to achieve what Virginia Woolf calls “health,” “truth,” and “happiness.”)

The most obvious similarity between Kiti and Gregor is that they both take the forms of insects; however, their and their families’ reactions to the changes account for the essential difference between the characters. Whereas Kiti thinks a cricket represents “all that [is] good and strong and beautiful in the world ( Cricket Boy , p. 2), Gregor is repulsed by his insect body and “closes his eyes so as not to have to see his squirming legs” ( Metamorphosis , p, 3). Their situations also affect their families differently.  Kiti’s experience serves as a catalyst that brings his family closer together: “For the first time, his father had become human, and he loved his father then” ( CB , p. 2). Gregor’s transformation, on the other hand, succeeds in further alienating him from his family: his parents “could not bring themselves to come in to him” ( M , p. 31). While Kiti and his parents develop a bond based on understanding and mutual respect, Gregor becomes not only emotionally estranged from his family, but also physically separated from them.

Some comments on the structure:   The writer is clearly on her way, with specific examples from the texts, to supporting her argument concerning the need for self-respect and communication. Notice that she uses transitions such as “however,” “whereas,” “also,” “on the other hand,” while,” and “not only…, but also…” to connect her thoughts and make her sentences cohere. Transitional words and phrases are the “glue” both within and between paragraphs: they help writers stick to the point, and also allow readers to stay on the path the writer intends.

Transitions

Writers use transitional words and expressions as markers to guide readers on their exploratory journey. They can express relationships very explicitly , which is often exactly what is needed. However, experienced writers can also build more subtle bridges between ideas, hinting at relationships with implicit transitions. These relationships may change from vague impressions to a very concrete statement, as the argument develops, allowing the reader to “discover” the writer’s conclusion as the essay builds to its final paragraph.

Examples of explicit transitional expressions

• Comparison: such as, like, similarly, likewise, in the same way, in comparison, correspondingly, analogous to
• Contrast: but, however, in contrast, although, different from, opposing, another distinction, paradoxically
•   Cause-effect: because, as a result, consequently, for this reason, produced, generated, yielded
•   Sequence: initially, subsequently, at the onset, next, in turn, then, ultimately
•  Emphasis: above all, of major interest, unequivocally, significantly, of great concern, notably
•   Examples: for example, in this instance, specifically, such as, to illustrate, in particular
•   Adding points: as well as, furthermore, also, moreover, in addition, again, besides

If you find that you are overusing explicit connectors and your transitions are beginning to feel mechanical (How many times have you used “furthermore” or “however”?  How many “other hands” do you have?), you can improve the flow of your writing either by changing up the transitional expressions, or by shifting toward more implicit transitions. One technique is, in the first sentence of the new paragraph, refer (either explicitly or implicitly) to material in the preceding paragraph. For example:

When Alcibiades does give his speech, we see that his example is Socrates himself.

While this interpretation still seems reasonable, I was surprised at the difficulty of uncovering useable data in the records of past societies.

This sometimes sickening detail that Dante uses to draw the reader emotionally into the Inferno also stimulates the reader to think about what he or she feels.

The Greek system is much more relaxed; obeisance and respect for the gods is not required, although in most cases it seems to make life easier.

Each of these implicit transition sentences builds on the previous paragraph and calls for support in the new paragraph. Even more subtle (that is, more difficult) would be to make the last sentence of the paragraph indicate the direction the next paragraph will take. If you try this, be careful you do not at the same time change the subject. You do not want to introduce a new idea at the end of a paragraph, and destroy its unity. Since it suggests a change in direction, we see this device used most commonly with thesis sentences at the end of introductory paragraphs, or in transitional paragraphs like the example above.

Other examples of hinges writers use to make connections include pronouns referring back to nouns in the previous paragraphs and synonyms to avoid repetition and overuse of pronouns. A good rule is not to overuse any device.

Concluding Paragraphs

From a student essay on Crime and Punishment :

Raskolnikov finally finds a new life:

Indeed he [is] not consciously reasoning at all; he [can] only feel .  Life [has] taken the place of logic and something quite different must be worked out in his mind. (Epi. II, p. 464)

Thus he ends his suffering by abandoning intelligence and reasoning.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that “above all the logic of the head is the feeling of the heart.” Ultimately, Raskolnikov transcends the “logic of the head” by discovering love and freedom.

Some comments on the structure: The paragraph works well as a conclusion because you can tell immediately that the writer has said all that she wants to say about the subject. She uses a quotation from another source, to “rub up against” Dostoevsky, expanding the dialogue between the text, the writer, and the reader by adding another voice. The answer to the “so what?” question is implied in the last sentence: love and freedom are values we all can share. Note that although this is a different conclusion from that of the earlier essay discussing Crime and Punishment , both interpretations are interesting and valid because both writers supported their arguments with careful readings of the text.

From a History essay analyzing the influence of Philippe Ariès’s book Centuries of Childhood on later historians:

In the end, Centuries of Childhood did not establish a conceptual framework for children’s history. Nor did the rival philosophies of history create a new paradigm for children’s history. Ariès identified a subject of study. He was a prospector who uncovered a rich vein of material. Subsequent miners should use whatever tools and techniques are best suited to getting the ore out of the ground. Historians should stop fighting over theories and get to work uncovering the lives of children and families. This will involve, as Jordanova suggested, self-awareness and sensitivity. But it should not be sidetracked by ideological debates. As Cunningham observed, the stakes for modern children and families are high. To make children’s history useful for the present, historians of children and families need to put aside their differences and get back to work.

Some comments on the structure:   As in the previous example, the writer includes the perspectives of other commentators. This is especially common in essays on secondary sources in history, because “historiography” is often imagined as an ongoing conversation about primary and important secondary texts. The “so what” statement is more explicit this time, relating the study of children in the past to improving the lives of children and families today. The importance of connecting with the needs of today is problematic (many historians would criticize this as “presentism”); so the writer includes a supporting perspective from a sympathetic commentator.

From an essay in which the writer compares and contrasts the character she is examining with a character from another work:

Like Ophelia, Gretchen has moments of confusion and despair, but she decides to give in to her feelings and take responsibility for them. By having Gretchen freely stay behind to face her execution, Goethe casts aside any similarities that his character shares with Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Along with the empowering freedom of Gretchen’s striving comes the struggle to act rightly. But if no objective absolutes exist, according to Goethe’s God, on what basis can Gretchen make her decisions in order to be saved? She comes to the realization that the only absolutes exist within herself. Goethe’s God saves her, not for being a penitent Christian, but for staying true to these self-imposed absolutes.

Some comments on the structure:  Another strong conclusion. The writer’s interpretation could be contested, but she has argued it well and convincingly throughout the essay and concluded strongly. Incidentally, note also that by specifying “Goethe’s God” in her interpretation she avoids any distracting discussion of religion and keeps her writing focused on literary analysis. We don’t argue the nature of “God” in an essay about literature; only the nature of the “God” in the text.

A Short Handbook for writing essays in the Humanities and Social Sciences Copyright © 2019 by Salvatore F. Allosso and Dan Allosso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

• Literary Terms

When and How to Write Coherently

• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write Coherently

The Importance of Coherence

Say you’re reading a piece of academic writing – maybe a textbook. As you read, you find yourself drifting off, having to read the same sentence over and over before you understand it. Maybe, after a while, you get frustrated and give up on the chapter. What happened?

Nine times out of ten, this is a symptom of incoherence. Your brain is unable to find a unified argument or narrative in the book. This may become frustrating and often happens when a book is above your current level of understanding. To someone else, the writing might seem perfectly coherent, because they understand the concepts involved. But from your perspective, the chapter seems incoherent. And as a result, you don’t get as much out of it as you otherwise would.

How can you avoid this in your own writing? How can you make sure that readers don’t misunderstand you (or just give up altogether)? The answer is to work on coherent writing. Coherence is perhaps the most important feature of argumentative writing. Without it, everything falls apart. If an argument is not coherent, it doesn’t matter how good the evidence is, or how beautiful the writing is: an incoherent argument will never persuade anyone or even hold their attention.

How to Create Coherence

• Keep your reader in mind . Coherence is a matter of perception, so you have to write in a way that your reader will understand. Make sure you use terms that the reader will understand. Also, use lines of reasoning that the reader can follow. In school assignments, the reader is your teacher or professor, so this is the person you need to keep in mind as you write.
• Repeat key terms . Many writers are afraid to repeat words because they don’t want their writing to become “monotonous.” That’s a good instinct, but actually it’s helpful to repeat words – as long as they’re the right words! Look again at the example in §2: it uses the term “credit card” in nearly every sentence. But it’s OK, because “credit card” is a key term. You should use key terms frequently, but use variety in non-key terms.
• Define your terms . In complex arguments, it may be necessary to define a term for your reader. This is especially important when you’re using a word that has multiple meanings for different people (such as “democracy,” “morality,” “utilitarianism,” or “God”).
• Craft smooth transitions . Make sure that each paragraph flows naturally into the next one. If you shift topics abruptly, your readers will probably find your writing incoherent.
• Check for self-contradictions . Once you’ve made a statement, you have to stick to it! Take care that your later sentences don’t contradict or undermine what you’ve said before.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

Pasco-Hernando State College

• Unity and Coherence in Essays
• The Writing Process
• Paragraphs and Essays
• Proving the Thesis/Critical Thinking
• Appropriate Language

Test Yourself

• Essay Organization Quiz
• Sample Essay - Fairies
• Sample Essay - Modern Technology

Related Pages

• Proving the Thesis

Unity is the idea that all parts of the writing work to achieve the same goal: proving the thesis. Just as the content of a paragraph should focus on a topic sentence, the content of an essay must focus on the thesis.  The introduction paragraph introduces the thesis, the body paragraphs each have a proof point (topic sentence) with content that proves the thesis, and the concluding paragraph sums up the proof and restates the thesis. Extraneous information in any part of the essay which is not related to the thesis is distracting and takes away from the strength of proving the thesis.

An essay must have coherence. The sentences must flow smoothly and logically from one to the next as they support the purpose of  each paragraph in proving the thesis. .

Just as the last sentence in a paragraph must connect back to the topic sentence of the paragraph, the last paragraph of the essay should connect back to the thesis by reviewing the proof and restating the thesis.

Example of Essay with Problems of Unity and Coherence

Here is an example of a brief essay that includes a paragraph that  does not  support the thesis “Many people are changing their diets to be healthier.”

     People are concerned about pesticides, steroids, and antibiotics in the food they eat.  Many now shop for organic foods since they don’t have the pesticides used in conventionally grown food.  Meat from chicken and cows that are not given steroids or antibiotics are gaining in popularity even though they are much more expensive. More and more, people are eliminating pesticides, steroids, and antibiotics from their diets.

    Eating healthier also is beneficial to the environment since there are less pesticides poisoning the earth. Pesticides getting into the waterways is creating a problem with drinking water.  Historically, safe drinking water has been a problem. It is believed the Ancient Egyptians drank beer since the water was not safe to drink.  Brewing beer killed the harmful organisms and bacteria in the water from the Nile.

     There is a growing concern about eating genetically modified foods, and people are opting for non-GMO diets.  Some people say there are more allergic reactions and other health problems resulting from these foods.  Others are concerned because there are no long-term studies which clearly show no adverse health effects such as cancers or other illnesses. Avoiding GMO food is another way people are eating healthier food.

See how just one paragraph  can take away from the effectiveness of the essay in showing how people are changing to healthier food since the unity and coherence are affected.  There is no longer unity among all the paragraphs.  The thought pattern is disjointed and the essay loses its coherence.

Transitions and Logical Flow of Ideas

Transitions are words, groups of words, or sentences that connect one sentence to another or one paragraph to another.

They promote a logical flow from one idea to the next and overall unity and coherence.

While transitions are not needed in every sentence or at the end of every paragraph, they are missed when they are omitted since the flow of thoughts becomes disjointed or even confusing.

There are different types of transitions:

Time – before, after, during, in the meantime, nowadays

Space – over, around, under

Examples – for instance, one example is

Comparison – on the other hand, the opposing view

Consequence – as a result, subsequently

These are just a few examples.  The idea is to paint a clear, logical connection between sentences and between paragraphs.

• Printer-friendly version

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

6 Step #3: Coherent, Unified Paragraphs

Strong essays are built with solid, coherent, and unified paragraphs. They should be digestible units of thought that have similar structure to the essay itself: a topic sentence, a body of support, and a concluding or transitional statement to help the reader move through the essay with clarity. Body paragraphs should also be arranged according to your primary pattern of development and focused on supporting your big idea(s).

A body paragraph is an expansion of a single thought that is laid out according to a specific, logical structure:

• A strong, clear topic sentence that states the main idea of the paragraph (which will likely be a sub-point helping to explore your thesis).
• Several (two-four) sentences of development and support for your topic sentence: including quotes, summaries, and paraphrases of relevant sources and your substantive responses to the source material.
• A closing sentence of summary and/or a transition into the next paragraph.

BEST: When the writer uses paragraphs to present unified, coherent, organized, and well-developed thoughts in support of their overall thesis.

• Consult this link on how to construct coherent, engaging, and unified paragraphs.
• Here is another valuable source for shaping coherent paragraphs: OWL Website.
• And yet another link that addresses paragraph length and consistency.
• Here is a video on writing strong body paragraphs.
• Watch this video on Writing Effective Paragraphs.
• Here is another video on writing strong transitions.
• And finally, a companion link for writing smooth transitions.

The Writing Process Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Gurevich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Coherence And Cohesion: Writing Tips For Seamless Texts

Learn coherence and cohesion secrets to create seamlessly flowing, impactful writing. Read this content and understand both.

Understanding the importance of coherence and cohesion in writing is fundamental, as these principles significantly impact how well your message is conveyed to the reader. These concepts empower you to create clear, logical, and organized content. 

When your writing lacks coherence, it may appear disjointed, confusing, and challenging for the reader to follow. On the other hand, without cohesion, your ideas may seem scattered and unrelated. Mastering these aspects not only enhances the overall quality of your writing but also ensures your audience can easily grasp and appreciate the information you’re presenting. 

In this article, you will gain an in-depth understanding of these essential elements. The exploration begins with a clear definition of coherence and cohesion, followed by an examination of their intricate relationship.

Definition Of Coherence

Coherence is a fundamental aspect of effective communication through written language. It encompasses the logical and orderly arrangement of ideas, details, and arguments within a text, ensuring that they connect seamlessly to convey a clear and unified message. Coherent writing allows readers to follow the author’s thought process without confusion or disruption. 

This connection of ideas is achieved through the strategic use of organization, structure, transitional elements, and logical progression. In essence, coherence is the glue that binds individual sentences, paragraphs, and sections into a cohesive and comprehensible whole, making it an indispensable element for conveying information, presenting arguments, and telling compelling stories in written form.

Definition Of Cohesion

Cohesion refers to the quality of a written text that makes it clear, organized, and logically connected. It is achieved through various linguistic devices such as transitional words, pronoun references, repetition, and logical sequencing. 

Cohesion ensures that the ideas within a text flow smoothly and are linked together, making the text easier to understand and follow. In essence, cohesion contributes to the overall coherence of a written piece, ensuring that it is cohesive and well-structured.

Relationship Between Coherence And Cohesion

The relationship between coherence and cohesion in writing is a close and interdependent one. Coherence and cohesion work together to create well-structured and easily understandable texts.

Coherence primarily deals with the overall clarity and logical flow of ideas in a piece of writing. It involves the organization of content in a way that makes sense to the reader. Coherent writing maintains a clear and consistent focus on the topic, using logical transitions between sentences and paragraphs.

On the other hand, cohesion focuses on the specific linguistic devices and techniques used to connect different parts of a text. These devices include transitional words (e.g., “therefore,” “however”), pronoun references (e.g., “it,” “they”), repetition of key terms, and logical sequencing of ideas. Cohesion ensures that the sentences within a text are linked together smoothly, enhancing the readability and comprehension of the content.

In essence, cohesion serves as a tool to achieve coherence. When a writer effectively employs cohesive elements in their writing, it enhances the overall coherence of the text. Without cohesion, even well-structured ideas may appear disjointed or confusing to the reader. Therefore, coherence and cohesion are complementary aspects of effective writing, working hand in hand to convey ideas clearly and persuasively.

Types Of Cohesion

Cohesion plays a vital role in the coherence and flow of your writing. In this section, we will explore different types of cohesion, each contributing to the overall clarity and structure of your text.

Grammatical Cohesion

Grammatical cohesion focuses on the grammatical and structural elements within a text that contribute to its coherence. It involves using linguistic devices, like pronouns and sentence structure, to create clear relationships between ideas and sentences. This type of cohesion ensures smooth writing flow and aids readers in understanding connections between different parts of your text.

For instance, pronouns like “it,” “they,” and “this” refer back to previously mentioned nouns, preventing repetition. Sentence structure, including parallelism and transitional words, also plays a crucial role in achieving grammatical cohesion. It ensures consistent presentation of similar ideas and guides readers through your writing.

Reiterative Cohesion

Reiterative cohesion involves the repetition of words, phrases, or ideas within a text to reinforce key concepts and enhance clarity. This type of cohesion is particularly useful when you want to emphasize specific points or themes throughout your writing.

By restating essential elements, you create a sense of continuity and remind readers of the central message. However, it’s crucial to use reiteration judiciously to avoid redundancy and monotony.

Lexical/Semantic/Logical Cohesion

Lexical, semantic, or logical cohesion ensures meaningful connections in your text. Writers use techniques like synonyms, antonyms, and precise vocabulary to clarify complex ideas. It also maintains consistency in word meanings and logical progression, enhancing clarity and engagement.

Referential Cohesion

Referential cohesion involves linking ideas and information within a text. It’s achieved by using pronouns, demonstratives, or repetition to connect concepts. This cohesion helps readers follow the flow of the text and understand the relationships between different parts of the content.

Textual Or Interpersonal Cohesion

Textual or interpersonal cohesion focuses on how language is used to engage and communicate with the reader. It involves strategies such as addressing the reader directly, using inclusive language, and creating a sense of connection. This type of cohesion aims to make the text more relatable and interactive, enhancing the reader’s overall experience.

Tips For Using Coherence And Cohesion In Writing

When it comes to effective writing, coherence, and cohesion play a pivotal role in shaping the clarity and flow of your text. In this section, we’ll delve into practical tips for harnessing these vital elements to create well-structured and engaging content.

Develop Topic Sentences And Themes

Effective writing hinges on clear topic sentences and well-defined themes. These elements act as your text’s structural framework, ensuring both you and your readers follow a logical path through your content.

• Identify Core Ideas: Before you begin writing, pinpoint the central concepts or themes you want to convey. These serve as the core messages or arguments you’ll explore.
• Craft Concise Topic Sentences: Start each paragraph with a concise topic sentence that introduces its main idea. Think of these sentences as guideposts, signaling what’s ahead and providing clarity.
• Establish a Strong Base: Topic sentences and themes set your text’s direction and purpose. Without them, your writing can seem disjointed and confusing.
• Map Out Content: Effective topic sentences not only introduce a paragraph’s main point but also outline the supporting details. They create a roadmap, making your content structure clear.
• Improve Readability: Strong topic sentences and themes make your writing more accessible. They help readers grasp ideas quickly and navigate your text effortlessly, making your message compelling.

By integrating these techniques into your writing, you enhance your content’s coherence and cohesion, making it more engaging and persuasive. Crafting clear topic sentences and themes provides a foundation for your ideas to shine and resonate with your audience.

Make Connections Between Ideas And Sentences

Writing with coherence involves crafting a seamless path for your readers. This means ensuring that your ideas flow logically and cohesively from one to the next. To achieve this, use transition words and phrases like “however,” “therefore,” “in contrast,” and “moreover” to signal relationships between ideas. 

Avoid abrupt shifts, as these can confuse readers and disrupt the flow. By making these connections, you not only maintain coherence but also enhance clarity and engagement, providing your audience with a richer and more enjoyable reading experience.

Utilize Transition Words To Enhance Understanding

Transition words are the glue that holds your writing together, creating a bridge between sentences and paragraphs. These words and phrases, such as “however,” “in addition,” “consequently,” and “for instance,” help guide readers through your text, making it easier for them to follow your line of thought. 

When used effectively, transition words create a smooth and logical flow, enhancing the coherence of your writing. They clarify relationships between ideas, signal shifts in focus, and add depth to your arguments. By incorporating these linguistic tools into your writing, you not only boost comprehension but also elevate the overall quality of your work.

Use Repetition When Appropriate

Repetition in writing, when used judiciously, can be a powerful tool to reinforce key ideas, engage readers, and create memorable content. By repeating certain words, phrases, or concepts, you can emphasize their significance and drive your point home effectively. 

However, the key is to use repetition purposefully and sparingly, ensuring that it aligns with your writing’s objectives. Whether it’s repeating a central theme, a thought-provoking question, or a striking metaphor, strategic repetition can enhance the cohesiveness and impact of your writing, leaving a lasting impression on your audience.

Checklist For Essay Coherence And Cohesiveness

When crafting an essay, ensuring that it has both coherence and cohesion is paramount to engage your audience and effectively convey your message. Follow this checklist to enhance the quality of your writing:

• Clear Thesis Statement: Begin with a concise and well-defined thesis statement that sets the tone for your essay.
• Logical Flow: Organize your ideas logically, ensuring each paragraph connects seamlessly to the next.
• Transitions: Use transitional words and phrases like “however,” “therefore,” and “in addition” to guide your reader through your essay.
• Topic Sentences: Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence that previews the content to follow.
• Consistent Point of View: Maintain a consistent perspective (first, second, or third person) throughout your essay.
• Repetition with Purpose: Use repetition thoughtfully to reinforce key points or themes.
• Parallel Structure: Structure sentences and lists in a parallel format for clarity.
• Pronoun Clarity: Ensure pronouns have clear antecedents to avoid confusion.
• Sentence Variety: Vary your sentence structure for rhythm and engagement.
• Proofreading: Thoroughly proofread your essay for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.

By implementing these strategies, you can create essays that are not only coherent and cohesive but also compelling and impactful.

High Impact And Greater Visibility For Your Work

Mind the Graph can bring high impact and greater visibility to your work by transforming your research findings into engaging visuals that are easily understood and shared. This can help you reach a broader audience, foster collaboration, and ultimately enhance the recognition and influence of your scientific contributions.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Exclusive high quality content about effective visual communication in science.

Unlock Your Creativity

Create infographics, presentations and other scientifically-accurate designs without hassle — absolutely free for 7 days!

About Jessica Abbadia

Jessica Abbadia is a lawyer that has been working in Digital Marketing since 2020, improving organic performance for apps and websites in various regions through ASO and SEO. Currently developing scientific and intellectual knowledge for the community's benefit. Jessica is an animal rights activist who enjoys reading and drinking strong coffee.

Content tags

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

6.3: Cohesion and Coherence

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 5079

• Amy Guptill
• The College at Brockport, SUNY

With a key sentence established, the next task is to shape the body of your paragraph to be both cohesive and coherent. As Williams and Bizup 8 explain, cohesion is about the “sense of flow” (how each sentence fits with the next), while coherence is about the “sense of the whole”. 9 Some students worry too much about “flow” and spend a lot of time on sentence-level issues to promote it. I encourage you to focus on underlying structure. For the most part, a text reads smoothly when it conveys a thoughtful and well organized argument or analysis. Focus first and most on your ideas, on crafting an ambitious analysis. The most useful guides advise you to first focus on getting your ideas on paper and then revising for organization and wordsmithing later, refining the analysis as you go. Thus, I discuss creating cohesion and coherent paragraphs here as if you already have some rough text written and are in the process of smoothing out your prose to clarify your argument for both your reader and yourself.

Cohesion refers to the flow from sentence to sentence. For example, compare these passages:

Version A (That I Rewrote):

Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. If an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other, according to balance theory (1973:1363). 10 Bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties, Granovetter argues (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. If two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. Only weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends” can connect people in different cliques.

Version B (The Original By Giuffre):

Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. In brief, balance theory tells us that if an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other (1973:1363). Granovetter argues that because of this, bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. This is because if two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. The only way, therefore, that people in different cliques can be connected is through weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends.” 11

Version A has the exact same information as version B, but it is harder to read because it is less cohesive. Each sentence in version B begins with old information and bridges to new information. Here’s Version B again with the relevant parts emboldened:

Granovetter begins by looking at balance theory. In brief, balance theory tells us that if an actor, A, is strongly tied to both B and C, it is extremely likely that B and C are, sooner or later, going to be tied to each other (1973:1363). Granovetter argues that because of this, bridge ties between cliques are always weak ties (1973:1364). Weak ties may not necessarily be bridges, but Granovetter argues that bridges will be weak. This is because if two actors share a strong tie, they will draw in their other strong relations and will eventually form a clique. The only way, therefore, that people in different cliques can be connected is through weak ties that do not have the strength to draw together all the “friends of friends.”

The first sentence establishes the key idea of balance theory. The next sentence begins with balance theory and ends with social ties, which is the focus of the third sentence. The concept of weak ties connects the third and fourth sentences and concept of cliques the fifth and sixth sentences. In Version A, in contrast, the first sentence focuses on balance theory, but then the second sentence makes a new point about social ties before telling the reader that the point comes from balance theory. The reader has to take in a lot of unfamiliar information before learning how it fits in with familiar concepts. Version A is coherent, but the lack of cohesion makes it tedious to read.

The lesson is this: if you or others perceive a passage you’ve written to be awkward or choppy, even though the topic is consistent, try rewriting it to ensure that each sentence begins with a familiar term or concept. If your points don’t naturally daisy-chain together like the examples given here, consider numbering them. For example, you may choose to write, “Proponents of the legislation point to four major benefits.” Then you could discuss four loosely related ideas without leaving your reader wondering how they relate.

While cohesion is about the sense of flow; coherence is about the sense of the whole . For example, here’s a passage that is cohesive (from sentence to sentence) but lacks coherence:

Your social networks and your location within them shape the kinds and amount of information that you have access to. Information is distinct from data, in that makes some kind of generalization about a person, thing, or population. Defensible generalizations about society can be either probabilities (i.e., statistics) or patterns (often from qualitative analysis). Such probabilities and patterns can be temporal, spatial, or simultaneous.

Each sentence in the above passage starts with a familiar idea and progresses to a new one, but it lacks coherence—a sense of being about one thing. Good writers often write passages like that when they’re free-writing or using the drafting stage to cast a wide net for ideas. A writer weighing the power and limits of social network analysis may free-write something like that example and, from there, develop a more specific plan for summarizing key insights about social networks and then discussing them with reference to the core tenets of social science. As a draft, an incoherent paragraph often points to a productive line of reasoning; one just has to continue thinking it through in order to identify a clear argumentative purpose for each paragraph. With its purpose defined, each paragraph, then, becomes a lot easier to write. Coherent paragraphs aren’t just about style; they are a sign of a thoughtful, well developed analysis.

British Council Malaysia

• English schools
• myClass Login
• Show search Search Search Close search

How to write a cohesive essay

When it comes to writing, people usually emphasise the importance of good grammar and proper spelling. However, there is a third element that actually helps authors get their thoughts across to readers, that is cohesiveness in writing. 

In writing, cohesiveness is the quality that makes it easier for people to read and understand an essay’s content. A cohesive essay has all its parts (beginning, middle, and end) united, supporting each other to inform or convince the reader. 

Unfortunately, this is an element that even intermediate or advanced writers stumble on. While the writer’s thoughts are in their compositions, all too often readers find it difficult to understand what is being said because of the poor organisation of ideas. This article provides tips on how you can make your essay cohesive. 

1. Identify the thesis statement of your essay

A thesis statement states what your position is regarding the topic you are discussing. To make an essay worth reading, you will need to make sure that you have a compelling stance.

However, identifying the thesis statement is only the first step. Each element that you put in your essay should be included in a way that supports your argument, which should be the focus of your writing. If you feel that some of the thoughts you initially included do not contribute to strengthening your position, it might be better to take them out when you revise your essay to have a more powerful piece. 

2. Create an outline 

One of the common mistakes made by writers is that they tend to add a lot of details to their essay which, while interesting, may not really be relevant to the topic at hand. Another problem is jumping from one thought to another, which can confuse a reader if they are not familiar with the subject.

Preparing an outline can help you avoid these difficulties. List the ideas you have in mind for your essay, and then see if you can arrange these thoughts in a way that would make it easy for your readers to understand what you are saying. 

While discursive essays do not usually contain stories, the same principle still applies. Your writing should have an introduction, a discussion portion and a conclusion. Again, make sure that each segment supports and strengthens your thesis statement.

As a side note, a good way to write the conclusion of your essay is to mention the points that you raised in your introduction. At the same time, you should use this section to summarise main ideas and restate your position to drive the message home to your readers. 

3. Make sure everything is connected

In connection to the previous point, make sure that each section of your essay is linked to the one after it. Think of your essay as a story: it should have a beginning, middle, and end, and the way that you write your piece should logically tie these elements together in a linear manner. 

4. Proofread before submitting your essay

Make sure to review your composition prior to submission. In most cases, the first draft may be a bit disorganised because this is the first time that your thoughts have been laid out on paper. By reviewing what you have written, you will be able to see which parts need editing, and which ones can be rearranged to make your essay more easily understood by your readers. Try to look at what you wrote from the point of view of your audience. Will they be able to understand your train of thought, or do you need to reorganise some parts to make it easier for them to appreciate what you are saying? Taking another look at your essay and editing it can do wonders for how your composition flows.

Writing a cohesive essay could be a lot easier than you think – especially when you follow these steps. Don’t forget that reading complements writing: try reading essays on various topics and see if each of their parts supports their identified goal or argument.

• I nfographics
• Show AWL words
• Subscribe to newsletter
• What is academic writing?
• Academic Style
• What is the writing process?
• Understanding the title
• Brainstorming
• Researching
• First draft
• Proofreading
• Report writing
• Compare & contrast
• Cause & effect
• Problem-solution
• Classification
• Essay structure
• Introduction
• Literature review
• Book review
• Research proposal
• Thesis/dissertation

What is cohesion?

• Cohesion vs coherence

Transition signals

• What are references?
• In-text citations
• Reference sections
• Reporting verbs
• Band descriptors

Show AWL words on this page.

Levels 1-5:     grey  Levels 6-10:   orange 

Show sorted lists of these words.

Any words you don't know? Look them up in the website's built-in dictionary .

Choose a dictionary .  Wordnet  OPTED  both

Cohesion How to make texts stick together

Cohesion and coherence are important features of academic writing. They are one of the features tested in exams of academic English, including the IELTS test and the TOEFL test . This page gives information on what cohesion is and how to achieve good cohesion. It also explains the difference between cohesion and coherence , and how to achieve good coherence. There is also an example essay to highlight the main features of cohesion mentioned in this section, as well as some exercises to help you practise.

For another look at the same content, check out YouTube or Youku , or the infographic .

It is important for the parts of a written text to be connected together. Another word for this is cohesion . This word comes from the verb cohere , which means 'to stick together'. Cohesion is therefore related to ensuring that the words and sentences you use stick together.

Good cohesion is achieved through the following five main methods, each of which is described in more detail below:

• repeated words/ideas
• reference words
• transition signals
• substitution

Two other ways in which cohesion is achieved in a text, which are covered less frequently in academic English courses, are shell nouns and thematic development . These are also considered below.

Repeated words/ideas

Check out the cohesion infographic »

One way to achieve cohesion is to repeat words, or to repeat ideas using different words (synonyms). Study the following example. Repeated words (or synonyms) are shown in bold.

Cohesion is an important feature of academic writing . It can help ensure that your writing coheres or 'sticks together', which will make it easier for the reader to follow the main ideas in your essay or report . You can achieve good cohesion by paying attention to five important features . The first of these is repeated words. The second key feature is reference words. The third one is transition signals. The fourth is substitution. The final important aspect is ellipsis.

In this example, the word cohesion is used several times, including as a verb ( coheres ). It is important, in academic writing, to avoid too much repetition, so using different word forms or synonyms is common. The word writing is also used several times, including the phrase essay or report , which is a synonym for writing . The words important features are also repeated, again using synonyms: key feature , important aspect .

Reference words

Reference words are words which are used to refer to something which is mentioned elsewhere in the text, usually in a preceding sentence. The most common type is pronouns, such as 'it' or 'this' or 'these'. Study the previous example again. This time, the reference words are shown in bold.

Cohesion is an important feature of academic writing. It can help ensure that your writing coheres or 'sticks together', which will make it easier for the reader to follow the main ideas in your essay or report. You can achieve good cohesion by paying attention to five important features. The first of these is repeated words. The second key feature is reference words. The third one is transition signals. The fourth is substitution. The final important aspect is ellipsis.

The words it , which and these are reference words. The first two of these, it and which , both refer to 'cohesion' used in the preceding sentence. The final example, these , refers to 'important features', again used in the sentence that precedes it.

Transition signals, also called cohesive devices or linking words, are words or phrases which show the relationship between ideas. There are many different types, the most common of which are explained in the next section on transition signals . Some examples of transition signals are:

• for example - used to give examples
• in contrast - used to show a contrasting or opposite idea
• first - used to show the first item in a list
• as a result - used to show a result or effect

Study the previous example again. This time, the transition signals are shown in bold. Here the transition signals simply give a list, relating to the five important features: first , second , third , fourth , and final .

Substitution

Substitution means using one or more words to replace (substitute) for one or more words used earlier in the text. Grammatically, it is similar to reference words, the main difference being that substitution is usually limited to the clause which follows the word(s) being substituted, whereas reference words can refer to something far back in the text. The most common words used for substitution are one , so , and auxiliary verbs such as do, have and be . The following is an example.

• Drinking alcohol before driving is illegal in many countries, since doing so can seriously impair one's ability to drive safely.

In this sentence, the phrase 'doing so' substitutes for the phrase 'drinking alcohol before driving' which appears at the beginning of the sentence.

Below is the example used throughout this section. There is just one example of substitution: the word one , which substitutes for the phrase 'important features'.

Ellipsis means leaving out one or more words, because the meaning is clear from the context. Ellipsis is sometimes called substitution by zero , since essentially one or more words are substituted with no word taking their place.

Below is the example passage again. There is one example of ellipsis: the phrase 'The fourth is', which means 'The fourth [important feature] is', so the words 'important feature' have been omitted.

Shell nouns

Shell nouns are abstract nouns which summarise the meaning of preceding or succeeding information. This summarising helps to generate cohesion. Shell nouns may also be called carrier nouns , signalling nouns , or anaphoric nouns . Examples are: approach, aspect, category, challenge, change, characteristics, class, difficulty, effect, event, fact, factor, feature, form, issue, manner, method, problem, process, purpose, reason, result, stage, subject, system, task, tendency, trend, and type . They are often used with pronouns 'this', 'these', 'that' or 'those', or with the definite article 'the'. For example:

• Virus transmission can be reduced via frequent washing of hands, use of face masks, and isolation of infected individuals. These methods , however, are not completely effective and transmission may still occur, especially among health workers who have close contact with infected individuals.
• An increasing number of overseas students are attending university in the UK. This trend has led to increased support networks for overseas students.

In the example passage used throughout this section, the word features serves as a shell noun, summarising the information later in the passage.

Cohesion is an important feature of academic writing. It can help ensure that your writing coheres or 'sticks together', which will make it easier for the reader to follow the main ideas in your essay or report. You can achieve good cohesion by paying attention to five important features . The first of these is repeated words. The second key feature is reference words. The third one is transition signals. The fourth is substitution. The final important aspect is ellipsis.

Thematic development

Cohesion can also be achieved by thematic development. The term theme refers to the first element of a sentence or clause. The development of the theme in the rest of the sentence is called the rheme . It is common for the rheme of one sentence to form the theme of the next sentence; this type of organisation is often referred to as given-to-new structure, and helps to make writing cohere.

Consider the following short passage, which is an extension of the first example above.

• Virus transmission can be reduced via frequent washing of hands, use of face masks, and isolation of infected individuals. These methods, however, are not completely effective and transmission may still occur, especially among health workers who have close contact with infected individuals. It is important for such health workers to pay particular attention to transmission methods and undergo regular screening.

Here we have the following pattern:

• Virus transmission [ theme ]
• can be reduced via frequent washing of hands, use of face masks, and isolation of infected individuals [ rheme ]
• These methods [ theme = rheme of preceding sentence ]
• are not completely effective and transmission may still occur, especially among health workers who have close contact with infected individuals [ rheme ]
• health workers [ theme, contained in rheme of preceding sentence ]
• [need to] to pay particular attention to transmission methods and undergo regular screening [ rheme ]

Cohesion vs. coherence

The words 'cohesion' and 'coherence' are often used together with a similar meaning, which relates to how a text joins together to make a unified whole. Although they are similar, they are not the same. Cohesion relates to the micro level of the text, i.e. the words and sentences and how they join together. Coherence , in contrast, relates to the organisation and connection of ideas and whether they can be understood by the reader, and as such is concerned with the macro level features of a text, such as topic sentences , thesis statement , the summary in the concluding paragraph (dealt with in the essay structure section), and other 'bigger' features including headings such as those used in reports .

Coherence can be improved by using an outline before writing (or a reverse outline , which is an outline written after the writing is finished), to check that the ideas are logical and well organised. Asking a peer to check the writing to see if it makes sense, i.e. peer feedback , is another way to help improve coherence in your writing.

Example essay

Below is an example essay. It is the one used in the persuasion essay section. Click on the different areas (in the shaded boxes to the right) to highlight the different cohesive aspects in this essay, i.e. repeated words/ideas, reference words, transition signals, substitution and ellipsis.

Title: Consider whether human activity has made the world a better place.

History shows that human beings have come a long way from where they started. They have developed new technologies which means that everybody can enjoy luxuries they never previously imagined. However , the technologies that are temporarily making this world a better place to live could well prove to be an ultimate disaster due to , among other things, the creation of nuclear weapons , increasing pollution , and loss of animal species . The biggest threat to the earth caused by modern human activity comes from the creation of nuclear weapons . Although it cannot be denied that countries have to defend themselves, the kind of weapons that some of them currently possess are far in excess of what is needed for defence . If these [nuclear] weapons were used, they could lead to the destruction of the entire planet . Another harm caused by human activity to this earth is pollution . People have become reliant on modern technology, which can have adverse effects on the environment . For example , reliance on cars causes air and noise pollution . Even seemingly innocent devices, such as computers and mobile phones, use electricity, most of which is produced from coal-burning power stations, which further adds to environmental pollution . If we do not curb our direct and indirect use of fossil fuels, the harm to the environment may be catastrophic. Animals are an important feature of this earth and the past decades have witnessed the extinction of a considerable number of animal species . This is the consequence of human encroachment on wildlife habitats, for example deforestation to expand cities. Some may argue that such loss of [animal]   species is natural and has occurred throughout earth's history. However , the current rate of [animal]   species loss far exceeds normal levels   [of animal species loss] , and is threatening to become a mass extinction event. In summary , there is no doubt that current human activities such as the creation of nuclear weapons , pollution , and destruction of wildlife , are harmful to the earth . It is important for us to see not only the short-term effects of our actions, but their long-term ones as well. Otherwise , human activities will be just another step towards destruction .

Aktas, R.N. and Cortes, V. (2008), 'Shell nouns as cohesive devices in published and ESL student writing', Journal of English for Academic Purposes , 7 (2008) 3-14.

Alexander, O., Argent, S. and Spencer, J. (2008) EAP Essentials: A teacher's guide to principles and practice . Reading: Garnet Publishing Ltd.

Gray, B. (2010) 'On the use of demonstrative pronouns and determiners as cohesive devices: A focus on sentence-initial this/these in academic prose', Journal of English for Academic Purposes , 9 (2010) 167-183.

Halliday, M. A. K., and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English . London: Longman.

Hinkel, E. (2004). Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar . Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc Publishers.

Hyland, K. (2006) English for Academic Purposes: An advanced resource book . Abingdon: Routledge.

Thornbury, S. (2005) Beyond the Sentence: Introducing discourse analysis . Oxford: Macmillan Education.

GET FREE EBOOK

Like the website? Try the books. Enter your email to receive a free sample from Academic Writing Genres .

Below is a checklist for essay cohesion and coherence. Use it to check your own writing, or get a peer (another student) to help you.

Next section

Find out more about transition signals in the next section.

• Transitions

Previous section

Go back to the previous section about paraphrasing .

• Paraphrasing

Exercises & Activities Some ways to practise this area of EAP

You need to login to view the exercises. If you do not already have an account, you can register for free.

• Register        
• Forgot password        
• Resend activiation email

Author: Sheldon Smith    ‖    Last modified: 03 February 2022.

Sheldon Smith is the founder and editor of EAPFoundation.com. He has been teaching English for Academic Purposes since 2004. Find out more about him in the about section and connect with him on Twitter , Facebook and LinkedIn .

Compare & contrast essays examine the similarities of two or more objects, and the differences.

Cause & effect essays consider the reasons (or causes) for something, then discuss the results (or effects).

Discussion essays require you to examine both sides of a situation and to conclude by saying which side you favour.

Problem-solution essays are a sub-type of SPSE essays (Situation, Problem, Solution, Evaluation).

Transition signals are useful in achieving good cohesion and coherence in your writing.

Reporting verbs are used to link your in-text citations to the information cited.

LESSON Coherence The quality of a writing that is well-organized and where events make sense. Coherence occurs when the ideas in a passage or in an entire piece “stick together,” allowing the reader to make sense of the information. is an important element in good writing and happens when all the elements of an essay A short piece of writing that focuses on at least one main idea. Some essays are also focused on the author's unique point of view, making them personal or autobiographical, while others are focused on a particular literary, scientific, or political subject. or paragraph A selection of a writing that is made up of sentences formed around one main point. Paragraphs are set apart by a new line and sometimes indentation. successfully work together to reinforce the main idea The most important or central thought of a reading selection. It also includes what the author wants the reader to understand about the topic he or she has chosen to write about. . Coherent writing makes that piece of writing much easier for a reader to understand. In this lesson, you will learn how to use referents The noun or idea that different words or phrases stand for in a sentence or paragraph. For instance, in the following sentences, John is the referent for He . John was a good boy. He always walked his sister to school . and transitions Tying two events, passages, or pieces of information together in a smooth way. In writing, transitions are sometimes called links. to create coherence in your own writing.

Referents One way that writers create coherence between sentences in a paragraph is by using referents in each sentence to connect it to the paragraph's main idea. A referent can be any number of words or phrases that refer back to the main idea. When you scatter references to your main idea throughout your writing, you remind readers what you are writing about. Restatements Using words or phrases to say something that has been said before in a different way. , synonyms A word or phrase that has an identical or very similar meaning to another word. Example: tiny is a synonym for small . , antonyms A word or phrase that has the opposite meaning from another word. Example: huge is an antonym for small . , pronouns A part of speech that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase. Examples include: I , he , you , they . , and enumeration To number or list things one after another. are all types of referents that you can use to keep the main idea fresh in readers’ minds.

A restatement is exactly what it sounds like—stating the main idea repeatedly with the same words. For example, if you are writing an essay that outlines the effects of childhood obesity, you might want to reuse the words "childhood obesity" and "effect" more than once because it reinforces the idea that you are discussing the effects of childhood obesity. This is a good technique to a certain point; however, you should not overuse it because readers can get tired of too much repetition.

To add variety in your writing, you can also utilize synonyms and/or antonyms of your main idea. In the example of writing about the effects of childhood obesity, you could use the words "result," "consequence," and "outcome" because they are synonyms for "effect." You could also use "juvenile" and "heaviness" or "unhealthy weight" to refer to childhood obesity. Also consider using antonyms like "healthy weight" or "slimness." These two techniques help you stay on topic as you write and assist your readers in clearly following your thoughts.

Pronouns are another way to refer back to your topic. A pronoun is a way to restate a noun.

Examples of Pronouns

In the example about the effects of childhood obesity, you could use pronouns to refer to the effects as "they" and childhood obesity as "it." Again, this breaks up the monotony that could occur by repeating "childhood obesity" multiple times.

The last major type of referent is enumeration. Enumeration is the process of listing where each sentence in the list relates back to the topic. Such lists use transitional words like "first," "second," and "third," and often use restatements as a companion strategy. For example, when writing about the effects of "childhood obesity," you could state that there are three main effects of obesity in childhood and then describe those effects in order.

Example of a paragraph lacking sufficient referents

Childhood obesity has a number of very negative effects. The first effect of childhood obesity is physical. Obese children are at a much higher risk for diabetes, and some children are so obese that the children are experiencing heart disease, a condition normally associated with adults. The second effect of childhood obesity is social. Obese children can be made fun of by their classmates and excluded from activities. The last effect of childhood obesity is psychological. Obese children tend to have much lower self-esteem than their peers. This affects them not only in their childhood, but adults who were obese as children generally are less happy. To avoid these effects, parents and teachers need to help children avoid obesity.

The paragraph above works to a certain extent. It certainly discusses the effects of childhood obesity, but it is very repetitive, which bores readers, and also lacks nuance Subtle differences in meaning and style of expression. . Now look at the same paragraph that uses referents and see how it is even more coherent.

Example of a paragraph using sufficient referents

Childhood obesity has a number of dire consequences. To begin with, kids who are even moderately overweight are at a much higher risk for diabetes, and some children are so heavy that they are experiencing heart disease, a condition normally associated with adults. In addition to the physical effects, heavier kids are also impacted socially. They can be made fun of by their classmates and excluded from activities. Lastly, kids who can't reach a healthy weight suffer psychologically. Obese children tend to have much lower self-esteem than their peers. This affects them not only in their youth, but also as adults. Those who had an unhealthy weight as children generally are less happy even if they are able to become more fit later in life. To avoid these effects, parents and teachers need to help children reach and maintain a healthy weight.

In the above paragraph, notice the various referents that make it richer and more interesting to read.

Restatements: Childhood obesity and effects Synonyms: heavy, overweight, unhealthy weight, kids, youth Antonyms: healthy weight, fit Pronouns: they, this Enumeration: To begin, In addition, Lastly

Transitions In addition to using referents, writers can also include transitions to guide readers from one idea to the next. Without transitions, readers have difficulty navigating through an essay. Here are a few examples of transitions.

Examples of Transitions

• First, second, third…
• For example
• In addition
• On the other hand
• In contrast

The last example paragraph used a number of transitions. Read through the version below and notice how it is more difficult to read when the transitions are removed.

Example of a paragraph lacking transitions

Childhood obesity has dire consequences. Kids who are even moderately overweight are at much higher risk for diabetes, and some children are so heavy that they are experiencing heart disease, a condition normally associated with adults. Heavier kids are impacted socially. They can be made fun of by their classmates and excluded from activities. Kids who can't reach a healthy weight suffer psychologically. Obese children tend to have much lower self-esteem than their peers. This affects them in their youth, but also as adults. Those who had an unhealthy weight as children generally are less happy even if they are able to become more fit later in life. Parents and teachers need to help children reach and maintain a healthy weight.

When you are explaining to a friend how to get somewhere, coherence is the difference between good directions and bad directions. Good, coherent directions are easy to follow, anticipate the confusing parts of the trip, and make your friend confident that he will get to where you want him to go. Bad directions that lack coherence tend to end up with a phone call from your friend telling you that he is lost.

The same is true in your writing. If you write an email or cover letter when applying for a job and that writing lacks coherence, the potential employer will get lost, stop reading what you have written, and look for another candidate. On the other hand, if your writing is coherent, the potential employer will look favorably on your application and consider you for an interview or possibly even the job itself.

Following is an example of a brief paragraph showing coherence:

Teachers have several expectations for their students. One of these includes being on time while another expectation is bringing the necessary materials. An additional requirement is reading the assigned chapters. Instructors also require class participation. In the end , a student who meets these expectations is likely to be a successful student.

What is the main idea here? Teachers and their expectations of students.

Does the writer use referents? Yes. restatement: expectations ; synonyms: requirement , instructors , require ; antonyms: none; pronouns: these ; enumeration: One of these , An additional , also

Does the writer use transitions? Yes. One , additional , In the end

Now, notice how the use of referents and transitions connects the following sentences together into a coherent paragraph. 

• Giving an oral report can be challenging.
• Giving an oral report requires preparation and practice.
• Preparation and practice help the speaker sound intelligent and credible.
• Many speakers find it is easier to give oral reports after they have built confidence by speaking in public for awhile.
• Listeners seem to respond better to a confident speaker.
• The most important elements in giving successful oral reports are practice and professionalism.

Coherent Paragraph:

Giving an oral report can be challenging. It requires preparation and practice. Doing these can help the speaker sound intelligent and credible. In fact, many speakers find it is easier to give oral reports after they have built confidence by speaking in public for awhile. In addition, listeners seem to respond better to a confident speaker. In the end, the most important elements in giving successful oral reports are practice and professionalism.

Answer the questions about how the following paragraph shows coherence:

One of the most important parts of the college experience that is often overlooked is socializing. It not only helps students have a good time while at school, but making new friends also contributes to their overall success. Studies show that students who socialize with classmates are more likely to do well in their classes and graduate with a degree than students who stick to themselves. Therefore, every new student should make an effort to connect with someone in each of their classes or join a student group during their first year; it may make the difference between having "some college" experience and actually getting a degree.

What is the main idea here?

The importance of making friends in college.

Does the writer use referents? 

Yes. restatement: socialize , students ; synonyms: making new friends , classmates ; antonyms: stick to themselves ; pronouns: it , these ; enumeration: none 

Does the writer use transitions? If so, list them.

Yes. Therefore

Now, use referents and transitions to connect these sentences together into a coherent paragraph. 

• Texting while driving has become a major hazard facing many motorists today.
• Recent studies show that people who are texting while driving are more distracted than people who are intoxicated.
• Recent studies show that people who are texting while driving have worse response times than people who are intoxicated.
• Being more distracted than people who are intoxicated makes it imperative that people put their phones down and focus on driving when they are behind the wheel.
• Having worse response times than people who are intoxicated makes it imperative that people put their phones down and focus on driving when they are behind the wheel.
• Laws should be passed making it illegal to use a cell phone while driving.
• People putting their phones down to focus on driving and making it illegal to use a cell phone while driving will help make the roads safer for everyone.

Sample Answer

Texting while driving has become a major hazard facing many motorists today. Recent studies show that people who are texting while driving are more distracted and have worse response times than those who are intoxicated. This makes it imperative that people put their phones down and focus on driving when they are behind the wheel. In addition, laws should be passed making it illegal to use a cell phone while driving. Taking these two steps will help make the roads safer for everyone.

What types of transitions do you like to use in your writing and how do they help build coherence?

I like to use, "first, second, third" to mark my supporting details and this helps connect one sentence to another, giving the paragraph unity.

If a paragraph does not contain transitions and/or referents, readers may find that it reads choppy, or jumpy, and they may not be able to find the focus of the paragraph.

Copyright ©2022 The NROC Project

Coherence in Composition

Guiding the Reader to Understand a Piece of Writing or Speech

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In composition , coherence refers to the meaningful connections that readers or listeners perceive in a written or oral text , often called linguistic or discourse coherence, and can occur on either the local or global level, depending on the audience and writer.

Coherence is directly increased by the amount of guidance a writer provides to the reader, either through context clues or through direct use of transitional phrases to direct the reader through an argument or narrative.

Word choice and sentence and paragraph structure influence the coherence of a written or spoken piece, but cultural knowledge, or understanding of the processes and natural orders on the local and global levels, can also serve as cohesive elements of writing. 

Guiding the Reader

It is important in composition to maintain the coherence of a piece by leading the reader or listener through the narrative or process by providing cohesive elements to the form. In "Marking Discourse Coherence," Uta Lenk states that the reader or listener's understanding of coherence "is influenced by the degree and kind of guidance given by the speaker: the more guidance is given, the easier it is for the hearer to establish the coherence according to the speaker's intentions."

Transitional words and phrases  like "therefore," "as a result," "because" and the like serve to move connect one posit to the next, either through cause and effect or correlation of data, while other transitional elements like combining and connecting sentences or repetition of keywords and structures can similarly guide the reader to make connections in tandem with their cultural knowledge of the topic.

Thomas S. Kane describes this cohesive element as "flow" in "The New Oxford Guide to Writing," wherein these "invisible links which bind the sentences of a paragraph can be established in two basic ways." The first, he says, is to establish a plan in the first of the paragraph and introduce each new idea with a word marking its place in this plan while the second concentrates on the successive linking of sentences to develop the plan through connecting each sentence to the one before it.

Constructing Coherence Relations

Coherence in composition and constructionist theory relies on a readers' local and global understanding of the written and spoken language, inferring the binding elements of text that help guide them through understanding the author's intentions. 

As Arthur C. Graesser, Peter Wiemer-Hasting and Katka Wiener-Hastings put it in "constructing Inferences and Relations During Text Comprehension," local coherence "is achieved if the reader can connect the incoming sentence to information in the previous sentence or to the content in working memory." On the other hand, global coherence comes from the major message or point of the structure of the sentence or from an earlier statement in the text. 

If not driven by these global or local understanding, the sentence is typically given coherence by explicit features like anaphoric references, connectives, predicates, signaling devices and transitional phrases. 

In any case, coherence is a mental process and the Coherence Principle accounts for "the fact that we do not communicate by verbal means only," according to Edda Weigand's "Language as Dialogue: From Rules to Principles." Ultimately, then, it comes down to the listener or leader's own comprehension skills, their interaction with the text, that influences the true coherence of a piece of writing.

• What Is Cohesion in Composition?
• What Is World Knowledge (Regarding Language Studies)?
• Paragraph Length in Compositions and Reports
• Definition and Examples of Body Paragraphs in Composition
• High School English Curricula Explained
• What Is Composition? Definition, Types, and Examples
• Making Inferences to Improve Reading Comprehension
• Paragraph Transition: Definition and Examples
• What Is Textuality?
• Definition and Examples of Text Linguistics
• AP English Exam: 101 Key Terms
• Definition and Examples of Paragraphing in Essays
• The Drafting Stage of the Writing Process
• Unity in Composition
• Ways of Achieving Emphasis in Writing and in Speech
• Understanding the Use of Language Through Discourse Analysis

Paragraph Unity, Coherence, and Development

In each paragraph of an essay, one particular idea or topic is developed and explained. In order to successfully do so, however, it is essential that the paragraph be written in a unified and coherent manner. 

A unified paragraph must follow the idea mentioned in the topic sentence and must not deviate from it. For a further explanation on topic sentences, see the Write Right on Topic Sentences .

A coherent paragraph has sentences that all logically follow each other; they are not isolated thoughts. Coherence can be achieved in several ways. First, using transitions helps connect ideas from one sentence to the next. For more on transitions, see the Write Right on Transitions . Second, ordering thoughts in numerical sequence helps to direct the reader from one point to the next. Third, structuring each paragraph according to one of the following patterns helps to organize sentences: general to particular; particular to general; whole to parts; question to answer; or effect to cause. 

Remember that a paragraph should have enough sentences so that the main idea of the topic sentence is completely developed. Generalizations should be supported with examples or illustrations. Also, details and descriptions help the reader to understand what you mean. Don't ever assume that the reader can read your mind: be specific enough to develop your ideas thoroughly, but avoid repetition

An effective paragraph might look like this:

It is commonly recognized that dogs have an extreme antagonism toward cats. This enmity between these two species can be traced back to the time of the early Egyptian dynasties. Archaeologists in recent years have discovered Egyptian texts in which there are detailed accounts of canines brutally mauling felines. Today this type of cruelty between these two domestic pets can be witnessed in regions as close as your own neighborhood. For example, when dogs are walked by their masters (and they happen to catch sight of a stray cat), they will pull with all their strength on their leash until the master is forced to yield; the typical result is that a feline is chased up a tree. The hatred between dogs and cats has lasted for many centuries, so it is unlikely that this conflict will ever end.

This paragraph is effective for the following reasons:

• The paragraph shows unity. All the sentences effectively relate back to the topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph. 
• The paragraph shows coherence. There is a flow of thoughts and ideas among the sentences in this paragraph. There are good transitions employed in the paragraph. The writer also presents her sub-topics in an orderly fashion that the reader can follow easily.
• The paragraph is developed. The writer gives herself enough space to develop the topic. She gives us at least two reasons to accept her argument and incorporates some examples in order to give those reasons more validity.

Reference: Strunk, Wiliam Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style . 4th ed., Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Copyright © 2009 Wheaton College Writing Center

• A Beginner’s Guide to IELTS
• Common Grammar Mistakes [for IELTS Writing Candidates]

Writing Correction Service

• Free IELTS Resources
• Practice Speaking Test

Select Page

Coherence and Cohesion – What Does it REALLY Mean?

Posted by David S. Wills | Jun 25, 2021 | IELTS Tips , Writing | 0

Today, I want to talk to you about coherence and cohesion. Yes, yes, I bet you THINK you already know what it means… but this article might surprise you. In fact, I’m sure it will because, according to research that I will explain in a moment, even IELTS examiners don’t always fully understand coherence and cohesion. As you can see, then, it is a lot more complicated than most people think, so I’m going to spend a little time talking about what it REALLY means and how you can get a high score for that section of the IELTS writing test.

Ok, let’s begin our lesson.

What is Coherence and Cohesion?

Whether you take the IELTS academic or general test, in both task 1 and task 2 of the writing exam, 25% of your score will come from something called coherence and cohesion. This is the same value as vocabulary, grammar, and answering the question properly, so obviously it is very important. But what does it mean?

Generally speaking, coherence and cohesion means how well your ideas are linked together. Most people think of it as structure, but this is a little too limited and it is in fact a bigger and more complicated idea than that. After all, you could probably learn the basics of essay structure in less than one hour!

Perhaps we should first consider what those two words mean because they are not exactly the same. “Coherence” is defined in the Cambridge dictionary as “a clear relationship between parts” while “cohesion” means “the state of sticking together.” In my 2019 book, How to Write the Perfect Essay for IELTS , I explained that:

coherence means the connection of ideas on a larger scale, while cohesion means connection at a sentence level. You could think of it another way: coherence refers to your paragraphs, and cohesion is about how your sentences link together

So from that, we can gather that a high score in coherence and cohesion requires having your ideas put logically into paragraphs and having your sentences flow together in an intuitive way. It is about the organisation of ideas.

Taking a Closer Look at Coherence and Cohesion

Now we have a GENERAL idea of what coherence and cohesion means, let’s look at the IELTS band descriptors to get a better understanding. These are freely available on the IELTS and British Council websites, but actually they are quite difficult to understand, and this causes various problems. Many candidates and even IELTS tutors misunderstand the words used here, and that is hardly surprising. In fact, a 2008 study reported that IELTS examiners found it more difficult to mark coherence and cohesion than any other part of the exam, and this seems to be partly related to the language used. As such, I want to show you the descriptors and explain exactly what they mean so that you fully understand what is required of you.

When we look at band 5 for IELTS writing task 2, we can see it talks about the essay having “some organisation” but perhaps lacking progression. It talks about “inadequate, inaccurate or overused cohesive devices,” as well as repetition and poor paragraphing.

If we skip ahead to band 7, there is now LOGICAL organisation, CLEAR progression, mostly good use of cohesive devices, and good paragraphing. When we go above band 7, there is nothing really specific. It just talks about those same things being done in a better or more natural way, with few if any problems.

If we look at the band descriptors for task 1, which is to say a letter or report, the criteria given is basically the same, except that there is no specific mention of paragraphing. Thus, we can conclude that there are 5 important factors in getting a good band score for coherence and cohesion:

• organisation
• progression
• cohesive devices
• referencing
• (for task 2) paragraphing

Let’s look at each of these in turn so that we can understand how to improve our IELTS essays.

Organisation

First of all, let’s look at organisation. This means how your ideas are arranged within the essay. As I mentioned earlier, an essay that gets band 5 for coherence and cohesion will have quite limited or ineffective organisation. There may just be a very basic structure imposed upon the ideas in this essay. At band 4 and below, it will be extremely random and quite difficult to understand.

To score band 6 means having your ideas presented in a way that a reader could somewhat understand, and beyond that they will be more neatly divided. Let’s say you are asked to “discuss both views” for a certain question. Well, organising your essay would first require putting those ideas into paragraphs. Most logically, you would have one paragraph with one perspective and another with the opposite perspective.

You might be wondering why “organisation” and “paragraphing” are listed as two different criteria here. Well, that’s because by “paragraphing” we mean the intricate and difficult aspects of building paragraphs rather than just grouping ideas loosely according to their topic.

It is also why there is no real mention of paragraphing for task 1 even though you are expected to use paragraphs. In a letter or a report, the paragraphs are seldom structured with the same degree of complexity as a task 2 essay. Last week, I talked about “grouping data” for task 1 reports and I said that you can often split a chart or table or diagram into two parts and devote one paragraph to each. Likewise, for a letter, you would give one short paragraph for each main point. These are both examples of organisation.

Progression

Progression is a tricky topic, or at least it seems that way at first. As we saw earlier, band 5 essays typically lack progression, whilst band 7 ones have “clear progression,” and even a band 6 essay will have “overall progression.” But what does this mean?

I’m sure you know the word “progress,” which is usually defined as moving forward or developing. An essay, letter, or report should feature progress by guiding the reader from a logical beginning to a logical ending. For essays, we start with an introduction. This will set the topic and tell the reader what comes next. Then there’s the middle of the essay, which will logically discuss ideas or provide an argument, before this is all neatly summarised in a conclusion.

A report is a bit simpler, with an introduction that gives an overview, followed by the relevant details, whilst a letter tends to be a bit more complicated, yet at the same time rather intuitive. It starts with a greeting, then states the purpose, gives the information, offers some sort of closing statement, and then signs off.

Problems with progression tend to come in the introduction, where people make mistakes like having a first sentence that fails to set up the topic in an easily understandable way, or lacks a thesis statement or opinion, if one is required. Similarly, body paragraphs may fail to demonstrate progression if each sentence does not logically build upon the previous one.

Cohesive Devices

Cohesive devices… Right, now here’s a topic I love to talk about! That may sound weird, right? Well, it is an interesting one because there’s so much bad advice on the internet nowadays. In the band descriptors for both task 1 and task 2, for band 7 it says you must use “a range of cohesive devices” and that’s the source of all this trouble.  

Because of this, some unqualified teachers tell their students that they must use lots of cohesive devices. Likewise, there are some AI-powered marking programmes that claim to be able to assess your writing and these are always pre-programmed to accept a certain number of cohesive devices as a sign of a band 6 or 7 or 8. If you put the word “However” at the start of each sentence, they’d give you a band 9, but of course this is not how a language works.

The most important thing about cohesive devices, first of all, is that you use them correctly . As for the number of them, well, I would invite you to go and read some articles by professional writers. In formal or semi-formal writing, how many cohesive devices do you see? Not that many… and certainly not as many as you find in the average IELTS essay.

In fact, I encounter at least one essay each week that has a cohesive device at the beginning of each sentence. This is just too much. It sounds artificial and, instead of giving greater coherence and cohesion, it actually makes the essay weak and disjointed. This would most likely cap your score for this section at just band 5 as it clearly falls into the category of “over-use.”

Instead, a good essay will not NEED many cohesive devices. It will logically guide the reader by presenting relevant information through the aforementioned organisation and progression. Instead, you should just use a few cohesive devices when they are necessary or to stress a point. Good writers often them to introduce an example or to highlight contrast.

Note that cohesive devices are typically quite formal and so if you are doing the general IELTS test and you must write a letter to a friend, then you really don’t want to include words like “however” and “meanwhile.” It would sound quite inappropriate. You can swap these out for less formal words. Similarly, there are some informal cohesive devices used only in spoken English like “last but not least,” which should definitely be avoided in a task 2 essay.

I should also mention here that we almost never modify cohesive devices and that you should aim to use them with total accuracy. Two common problems that I see in people’s essays are mixing together two different cohesive devices into a new one and misusing cohesive devices by misunderstanding their meanings.

Referencing

When I mark IELTS essays, one of the most common pieces of feedback that I give is that candidates need to reference more often and more clearly.

But what do I mean by “referencing”? In the context of the IELTS exam, referencing means using one word to refer back to a different word or phrase. Most commonly, this means replacing a noun with a pronoun, such as in these examples here.

The main benefit of this is avoiding repetition, which is something that native English speakers hate. In other cultures and languages, it is perfectly fine to say the same word dozens of times. In English, though, it sounds strange and oddly unpleasant. That’s why we use words like pronouns and synonyms to avoid saying the same thing again and again.

Sometimes this means replacing one single word with another word, but other times it might mean replacing a much longer phrase or group of phrases. Sometimes you have several ideas within a sentence that you need to refer back to, and so you need to make it clear to the reader which of those you are pointing to. The difference between “it” “this” and “that” becomes quite important. Perhaps most of all, though, you need to think about whether something is plural or singular – in other words, should you say “this” or “these,” “that” or “those”?

Referencing is something that you NEED to master regardless of whether you do the academic or general test, and is equally applicable in task 1 and task 2. Next time you read an article in English, pay attention to how the writer mentions previous ideas and avoids repetition. It might help you pick up on some subtle methods you didn’t know.

Paragraphing

You probably knew already that an essay, letter, or report needs paragraphs. For a standard task 2 essay, we usually have an introduction, two body paragraphs, and a conclusion. For task 1 it can be a bit more fluid, but you still need to group your ideas together.

When it comes to the art of paragraphing, we need to keep in mind this rule:

One paragraph = one idea

That’s not the only rule, but it is the most important one. Your introduction has one idea, which is to introduce the topic and tell the reader what to expect. The conclusion serves the purpose of summarising. But what about the body paragraphs?

Well, a good IELTS essay will have paragraphs that are clear and obvious. If you’ve been asked to look at a problem and solution, you will most likely discuss the problem in one paragraph and the solution in another. When discussing both sides of an argument, you will usually have one side described in each paragraph. It is not particularly difficult to do.  

The harder part of paragraphing is what I call “ internal paragraph structure .” This means how the various sentences in each paragraph work together to achieve unity – that is to say, to give the paragraph its singular meaning.

We normally start with a topic sentence, then have one or two sentences that explain the idea further. Depending on the content, we might then have an example, some details or a hypothetical situation, or a suggestion. It depends on the essay. Sometimes, we even have a concluding or transitional sentence at the end. It’s actually a huge topic to cover and I go into it in detail in this video here.

The key thing, though, is that each paragraph should have one idea and that every sentence within the paragraph should to some extent support that idea.

Overlap With Other Criteria

Before we review and finish this video, I’d like to add something that is NOT mentioned in the IELTS band descriptors. This is the fact that sometimes coherence and cohesion can be affected by your other English skills.

Think about it. Even if you took all of my advice in this video, studied the band descriptors, and learned the most amazing structures, you might find it hard to get a band 8 or 9 for coherence and cohesion if your grammar or vocabulary was really poor. That’s because big problems with language can reduce the clarity of your sentences and paragraphs. A few misused or misplaced words could mean that your sentences are very difficult or even impossible to understand.

In the previously mentioned study , this is one of the criticisms made. Every single examiner expressed some doubt over the marking of coherence and cohesion because they were unsure whether to categorise a problem as part of this or another IELTS marking criteria. In her excellent ebook, An Ex-Examiner’s Guide to the IELTS Band Descriptors , Shelly Cornick explains that big mistakes in language will make your essay impossible to understand, which would mean you could get a maximum of 6. She points out that the obsession most students have with so-called advanced vocabulary ensures they will get a poor score for coherence and cohesion.  

I mention this because it is important not to look at IELTS as a series of tasks you must complete in order to get a high score. Rather, it is an effective system for judging English ability. There is therefore some overlap between the different marking criteria. It’s good to know all about coherence and cohesion, but without levelling up all of your other skills, it alone would not be enough to save you from a poor score.

Conclusions

When it comes to coherence and cohesion, many people say “write four paragraphs and use lots of cohesive devices,” but as we have seen that is not a good enough approach. Coherence and cohesion is more complicated than that. It requires a good grasp of both language and logic.

In order to get better at this part of the exam, I would recommend doing several things. First of all, I highly recommend that you read lots of different articles and essays in English. As long as they are not too informal, they could help you to see how native speakers organise ideas, show progression, and substitute words to avoid repetition.

You should also look into cohesive devices, which are sometimes known as transition words, linkers, signposting language, and various other terms. Just remember that you shouldn’t use them for every sentence, and you MUST know their precise meaning and spelling.

Most importantly though, whether you are writing a practice essay or a real one, please spend some time to plan out your essay before you start writing. Most of what I have mentioned in this video could be more easily achieved by following a simple plan. Whilst this may seem like a waste of time to some people, it will help you do at least 3 of those 5 important things we discussed:

• Organise your ideas
• Show progression throughout
• Paragraph logically

Once you can do that, the cohesive devices will be easier to apply and then you just have to work on your referencing skills. With all that down, you’ll be on track for a great IELTS writing score.   

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

Related Posts

Describe a Person Who Influenced You

May 30, 2022

Is IELTS Fair?

November 17, 2018

Do you need the latest IELTS questions?

March 7, 2022

Describe a Plant or Flower [IELTS Speaking]

June 9, 2020

Leave a reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Download my IELTS Books

Recent Posts

• How to Improve your IELTS Writing Score
• Past Simple vs Past Perfect
• Complex Sentences
• How to Score Band 9 [Video Lesson]
• Taxing Fast Food: Model IELTS Essay

Recent Comments

• Francisca on Adverb Clauses: A Comprehensive Guide
• Mariam on IELTS Writing Task 2: Two-Part Questions
• abdelhadi skini on Subordinating Conjunction vs Conjunctive Adverb
• David S. Wills on How to Describe Tables for IELTS Writing Task 1
• anonymous on How to Describe Tables for IELTS Writing Task 1
• Lesson Plans
• Model Essays
• TED Video Lessons
• Weekly Roundup

• More from M-W
• To save this word, you'll need to log in. Log In

Definition of coherent

• analytical
• well-founded
• well-grounded

Examples of coherent in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'coherent.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

borrowed from Middle French & Latin; Middle French coherent , borrowed from Latin cohaerent-, cohaerens "touching, adjacent, cohering," from present participle of cohaerēre "to cohere "

1557, in the meaning defined at sense 2a

Dictionary Entries Near coherent

Cite this entry.

“Coherent.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coherent. Accessed 10 May. 2024.

More from Merriam-Webster on coherent

Nglish: Translation of coherent for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of coherent for Arabic Speakers

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Can you solve 4 words at once?

Word of the day.

See Definitions and Examples »

Get Word of the Day daily email!

Popular in Grammar & Usage

More commonly misspelled words, your vs. you're: how to use them correctly, every letter is silent, sometimes: a-z list of examples, more commonly mispronounced words, how to use em dashes (—), en dashes (–) , and hyphens (-), popular in wordplay, 12 star wars words, a great big list of bread words, 10 scrabble words without any vowels, 8 uncommon words related to love, 9 superb owl words, games & quizzes.

Get the magazine!

Geoffrey Mak Still Hasn’t Lost Hope in the Personal Essay

By jake nevins, photographed by acudus aranyian, may 7, 2024.

Geoffrey Mak, photographed by Acudus.

Last month, when I spoke to the writer and critic Geoffrey Mak about his debut collection of essays, Mean Boys , a white flower petal floated into his coffee just as he explained how he came to reconcile with his father, a firebrand conservative minister who features prominently in one of the book’s standout pieces, a tough but largely merciful account of their strained relationship and the indignities of the Evangelical church. It was a storybook moment that struck me as almost inappropriately mawkish, since Mak is not one for heavy sentiment. In Mean Boys , he applies a fierce intellect and a certain defiant posture to subjects as varied as edgelords, art fairs, raves, agitprop, organized religion, and mass murderers, but the conclusions reached are rarely tidy or comforting. Paranoia, distrust, and violence, Mak argues, are the defining sensibilities of these strange times. But we nevertheless retain our capacity for joy and intimacy, to be found, perhaps, in the random kindness of a stranger on the dance floor, or in the act of writing itself. “When I write, I care less about admiration and more about connection,” Mak explained. “And this very rich expansion of the soul can only happen with the personal essay.” Just before his book’s release, he and I got together downtown to talk about pain, pleasure, Trump, trad caths, and the Kardashians.

NEVINS: I finished the title essay last night. I feel like I should tell you up front that a very dear friend of mine grew up with Elliot Rodger and is mentioned by name in his manifesto. She’s actually working on this short in which she imagines his mother getting the call about the murders. So that was heavy on my mind as I was reading.

MAK: Oh, wow. Yeah, the mom. I tried not to do the whole “what went wrong” thing. I don’t think anyone wanted my speculation. But I felt really bad for her because like, she wasn’t that Asian parent who wouldn’t give positive affirmation. She really did, and she really had a kind of infinite patience. I don’t think Elliot was going out of his way to portray her well and she still came out pretty loving. So I feel really bad for her. Yeah, I would definitely watch this short.

NEVINS: I’ll keep you posted. Anyway, I was reading the title essay through the lens of your author’s note, in which you kind of riff on the uses and abuses of the personal essay. I’m curious to know what the utility of the form is for you, particularly in regard to these pieces.

MAK: Oh my gosh, I’m so opinionated on this. Where do I start? The personal essay now is really evolving. There are usually two directions it takes. I mean, everybody hates it. So the question is, “How do we make this less hateable?” And you either have one of two choices, which is to make it more like fiction or to make it more like journalism. And I think the pressure to push it in the direction of journalism is to back it up with research or reporting. So it’s like, this was my childhood in the church. Now I’m going to give you the history of the Presbyterian Church in America over the last couple centuries, and then I’m going to go back to myself.

NEVINS: And then in section four, we’ll do some scene work and actually go back to the church you had disavowed…

MAK: Yes, we’ve all read it. And I do really enjoy these essays. But specifically with Elliot Roger, I wanted to ask the question of what role pain has to do in our self-reported personal essays? Because I think our culture gives enormous authority to pain, but that also depends on who you are. If your pain is femme, queer, or non-white, it’s going to be respected as a source of authority. But we don’t seem to give a lot of aesthetic value or respect to stories of class deprivation. And then, in terms of status deprivation, there’s almost no discussion whatsoever because I don’t think our culture understands that status is real. But instead of using pain as a badge, there are other ways to represent it in literature, such as using it to disarm yourself and to become more open to relationships. I mean, something that really excites me about writing a memoir is the intense intimacy I will have with strangers I might never meet. I wanted to open the door to strange and intense intimacies. When I write, I care less about admiration and more about connection. And this very rich expansion of the soul can only happen with the personal essay. It’s special to me.

NEVINS: Yeah, I agree with that. I’m curious if it is any more or less strange than the intimacies that you write about experiencing more fleetingly while, say, K-holed on a dance floor. Those people will presumably know far less about you than your readers.

MAK: That’s true. But I am pretty much an open book. My boyfriend was like, “I’ve never met someone so unembarrassable before.” I write pretty openly about these years-long dry spells where I just wasn’t having any sex. And I think what happened during those years is that my brain and body and soul became really sensitive to opportunities for other kinds of intimacy other than sex. I think that wouldn’t have been the case if I were having a regular sex life. There are so many kinds of intimacy. I was listening to a lecture by the poet, Jorie Graham, and she was talking about how there’s a layer of intelligence in the human mind that is universal, and that’s the sensory one. Another thing about intimacy is that it doesn’t actually require knowledge. So when you’re on the dance floor, you’re radically intimate with all of these people moving together in the same direction, like a flock of birds. It’s really intimate to feel intense, purposeless joy.

NEVINS: I loved the section about how you assume a sort of maternal posture on the dance floor as the person whose job it was to sort of track everyone else’s highs. You and McKenzie Wark are writing more perceptively about nightlife than most people.

MAK: That book’s [ Raving ] amazing.

NEVINS: Yeah, that book’s great. But it does feel like the exception, since a lot of nightlife writing is just like, name-droppy. 

MAK: That’s true. Speaking of, I feel a little bad. I wrote a lot about my dad and I didn’t write a lot about my mom, and I’m actually much closer to my mother.

NEVINS: Well, that doesn’t surprise me after reading about your dad.

MAK: I know…

NEVINS: Has he read it?

MAK: He got the book on Sunday.

NEVINS: You couldn’t get him a galley?

MAK: I didn’t want to because I wanted to give him a finished copy. I was like, “Is it okay if you don’t read certain essays?” And he was like, “Geoff, it’s fine. It’s not going to be a big deal.” I can’t imagine him opening the table of contents and reading the title, My Father, the Minister and not reading it immediately.

NEVINS: It’s so hard, but we’re powerless. When I was 18 and had just moved to New York, I wrote this cringe essay in New York Magazine about getting paid for sex by a very famous artist who was 50 years older than me. It was my very first byline and I didn’t name him. I was like, “Mom, I was published in New York Magazine. But you can’t read it.” I assume she went online and read it anyway.

MAK: If I was more assertive about it, I think my dad would’ve respected it. But I mean, it’s a little bit selfish for me because it actually doesn’t make a huge difference. I wanted to protect him from certain things, but if he’s like, “It’s not a big deal,” then I’d be like, “Yeah, you know yourself. I’ll trust you.” It’s tricky because there’s the essay in the book about my father and then there’s the New Yorker one, which is basically the same exact material, but kind of truncated. But in the New Yorker one, I wanted to celebrate my dad. I wanted to tell the world that it was possible for a firebrand conservative to actually change his mind. But when I wrote the one in the book, I was in utter rage. The one in the book makes me look good. I’m the wronged one. I’m the one with the emotional strength to be like, “I forgive you.” But in the New Yorker one, I look really bad. I’m the burnout, the drug addict. I’m the one who goes home penniless and my dad says, “Yeah, I’ll take you in.” I think it’s a fuller story. 

NEVINS: Well, having read them both, I think this raises interesting questions about form. Narratively, in the container of the personal essay, did you not feel that both of these truths could coexist? By which I mean, do you feel that particular story, as it exists on the page, requires the tension of a character who’s plainly virtuous and one who’s not?

MAK: Well, the two of them together is a story of mutual forgiveness and at the end of the book version, I had this epiphany that we forgive people not because we think they can earn it one day. That’s not how forgiveness works. If you can earn forgiveness, that’s just called penance. What forgiveness really means is that we forgive someone because they can never earn it. There’s this moment where I call my father a coward. It’s pretty harsh, but I had asked him if he’d tell his church about me and he said no. So this kind of really intense failure is actually why I forgive him.

NEVINS: There’s no way a flower petal just fell into your coffee.

MAK: Right as we got to the moment of forgiveness. And to see him change made me radically optimistic about what the human heart is capable of. This isn’t in the book, but I did return to Christianity. Watching my dad model what a Christian was capable of made it quite appealing to me. I left Christianity and embraced queerness. And then when I came back to Christianity, I didn’t leave queerness. I brought it with me. I began reading some hard theology, and by “hard theology” I mean theology that’s meant for theologians. Liberals and leftists really hate Christians. And I’m not surprised. They have reason to. I hate them too. But all of the criticisms that the left has of Christianity, theology has answered them. People just don’t care enough to read it. It’s easier to have a target that’s demonized, and what’s more easy to demonize than the Evangelical church. I mean, they’re awful. But my whole life has been about finding tiny minorities that I could find a home in. I was never going to find a big movement that I felt was speaking to me. So there were the raves, there was theology, there was X, Y, and Z. But the stuff is out there, and it’s really thrilling.

NEVINS: This makes me curious to hear your thoughts on what you might call the kind of shallow iteration of religiosity coursing through downtown New York these days, which seems to me more reactionary than genuinely inquisitive.

MAK: Oh my god, yeah. Well, it is a little reactionary. Obviously, edgelords are a really big theme in the book. It’s hard to say what’s really going on there. Okay, tinfoil hat coming on. I had this epiphany when I was watching The Kardashians . You have this family that’s probably voting liberal. I mean, Caitlin isn’t, but I think most of the family is. But the show itself is a resounding endorsement of conservative ways of being, so to have this culture so loud and syndicated everywhere is to really promote a conservative way of life. And then I began to think of Trad Caths and like, you have all of these people in Dimes Square who are certainly voting liberal.

NEVINS: Well, if they’re voting at all.

MAK: Right, or they’re not voting. But them doing the hard work of stylizing Christianity and Catholicism and making it look cool is actually endorsing a kind of conservative constituency. I can’t not have a little bit of affection for the Trad Cath movement. I kind of love it on some level. I think it’s hilarious. Some people say to me, “Oh, but they’re not real.” They’re not real practitioners, they don’t actually believe. And I’m just like, “I’m not here to police that. I’m not ever here to police who’s the real Catholic, who’s the real trans, who’s the real leftist.” We can have rings of participation and intensities and seriousness.

NEVINS: Well, it’s interesting you say that. It’s such a rhetorical cudgel, but in the last several months I’ve experienced being told I’m not a “real Jew” for being pro-Palestine, which is really frustrating because I’m not only proud to be Jewish, but I also very much partake in all its cultural traditions, which I understand to be a spirit of community and fellowship and intellectual inquiry.

MAK: Who’s saying that to you?

NEVINS: Well, it mostly comes from Zionists. And I hate to create some sort of hierarchy, but the people saying that are certainly not any more observant than I am. They just seem to think that Zionism endows them with some totally arbitrary authority to decide who really is and isn’t Jewish. So I very much appreciate that despite having returned to Christianity yourself, you don’t take it upon yourself to police its other variants.

MAK: I kind of love the Praying shirts without the praying. I don’t have one. The moment’s a little bit over. But I have a little bit of affection.

NEVINS: I want to talk about Edgelords real quick because I think it’s a really impressive and expansive essay. Forgive me if I’m misstating the thesis, but—

MAK: I mean, it’s kind of messy. There are multiple theses.

NEVINS: Chief among them is that you’re identifying paranoia as the spirit of our age. Sometimes it can feel like we’re too close to an era or a scene to really assess it accurately. You write about the ways you were driven to what you call “madness.” I’m curious how you came to this organizing theory of the times.

MAK: Oh my gosh, there’s so much to say. There was a fundamental shift in how politics mobilized culture for its own advantages. There’s this excellent book, Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle. And if anybody reads it now, they’ll be like, “Duh, this is obvious.” But it really wasn’t when it came out. And basically the observation is that before, we thought politics would get to the center of culture and move out from there, just sending out the signals from the center and it’ll reach everyone eventually. And what Nagle tracked was that culture didn’t work top-down anymore. It actually worked bottom-up. You had very obscure communities that were disparate, fragmented, but they were meeting each other online, such as gamers, and they were interacting regularly, and they were organically growing really intense political beliefs and affinities. So if you look at Hillary versus Trump, they didn’t work from the center. Well, Trump was better at doing this than Hillary, but Trump was like, “I’m going to endorse the gamers and then I’ll get them on my side. I’m not going to create the gamers. I’m not going to tell them what to do. I’m just going to look for these obscure things.” So sometimes he would tweet things that only 200 people were meant to see.

NEVINS: Just so I’m understanding correctly, you’re suggesting that, as opposed to dictating to what might be a potential voting bloc or constituency, his politics were instead kind of subordinated to theirs?

MAK: He would pick people who already agreed with him.It was more about signals. Suddenly, signals became really important in a way that I don’t think they were before. I mean, the trans bathroom thing. That was really a Tumblr thing. Just a lot of young people on Tumblr were getting really up in arms about it. And then I think the Democratic Party was like, “Oh, it’s burgeoning in the underground, we need to get ahead of this now.” And then they did. So suddenly this very obscure Tumblr thing became a national discussion. That is kind of how culture works now, but it’s also due to the collapse of the mainstream-underground binary. Now, everyone kind of has their own micro-tribe, which is utterly illegible to other micro-tribes even though they might live a couple blocks away from each other. I mean, we feel that in New York, even just looking at Tribeca versus the Lower East Side. The art worlds that exist in the two are so different, yet they’re so close. And then, to go back to the point about paranoia, the Cambridge Analytica revelations were almost as big as the NSA revelations to me. I don’t think my friends cared as much as I did. But for some reason, I was just really locked onto it. To see how the campaign was explicitly stoking paranoia in their favor was absolutely alarming to me. And then I began to look at the culture and see all of these patterns of paranoia, and this was also happening concurrently with my own psychological degradation. It’s so funny, because the paranoid would see patterns, but as a paranoid, I began to see patterns of paranoia, which actually is what Eve Sedgwick writes about—how paranoia simply looks for itself. I actually see Mean Boys as a more morally and psychologically advanced text than Edgelords . In a way, M ean B oys rejects paranoia and decides to welcome in something that is toxic and harmful, which one might call a reparative gesture. The paranoid always pushes things out, and instead, I wanted to let something in, but without compromising judgment.

NEVINS: There was something really sobering about Mean Boys . You render Elliot Rodger almost grossly human, but I didn’t feel as though you were subject to his manipulations, which I guess is what people worry about when they clutch their pearls about writers “humanizing” bad guys.

MAK: I think it goes back to forgiveness. I’ll never say I forgive Elliot Rodger. I was not the one who was harmed. But  I think there’s an affect that doesn’t have a name, where you hold love and judgment together without one diminishing the other.

NEVINS: Well, you could call that love.

MAK: You’re right. I love that. That’s just love.

NEVINS: Anyway, what are you reading these days?

MAK: I’m literally four pages in, but I am reading Then the War by Carl Phillips. I’m reading a lot of poetry these days. Oh my god, so good. He’s kind of a poet for sentence writers. I think prose writers really like him. And being a prose writer myself, I really like it.

NEVINS: I feel that way about Vijay Seshadri.

MAK: Oh, I should read them. I’ve been reading a lot of Louise Glück.

NEVINS: That makes sense.

MAK: Does it? That’s so funny. I’ve been reading the collections back to back. It’s funny because when you get a 70-page poetry book in the mail, you really can read in one sitting. So I’m just inhaling it. What are you reading?

NEVINS: I just finished Adelle Waldman’s new novel. It’s been like, 10 years since her last one.

MAK: Since [ The Love Affairs of ] Nathaniel P.

NEVINS: I fucking love that book.

MAK: Oh my god, the best. One of the people I dedicate my book to is allegedly the man that Nathaniel P. Is based off of.

NEVINS: Wait, oh my god.

MAK: Yeah, it’s him.

NEVINS: Well, we won’t name him on the record. But if anyone’s curious, go buy Geoff’s book.

Related Posts

Dion “Tygapaw” McKenzie Wants to Decolonize the Rave

Aparna Nancherla on Eric Adams, Chat GPT, and the Gentrification of Yoga

Joshua Citarella Takes Us Into the Dark Corners of the Manosphere

MJ Corey of @Kardashian_Kolloquium is DeKonstructing the Famous Family

Derek Blasberg on the New Richard Avedon Exhibition at Gagosian

McKenzie Wark on Raving and the “Gentrification of Ketamine”

• Share full article

Advertisement

Bird Flu Is Spreading. Did We Learn Nothing From Covid?

Zeynep tufekci studied the u.s. response to covid. now she’s concerned about the nation’s response to bird flu..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

My name is Zeynep Tufekci. I’m a columnist at “The New York Times.” I’m also a professor at Princeton University, and I study science, society, and technology.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Bird flu is circulating in the United States among poultry, and also among cows. And so far, there has been one known human case.

For the second time ever in the US, a human being has contracted bird flu. Here’s what we know.

Fragments of H5N1, also known as bird flu, has been found 1 in 5 samples of pasteurized milk.

Officials also say the finding suggests the virus is spreading more prevalently among dairy herds than previously thought.

Now, four years after COVID began, obviously, it’s really frightening to think that we could potentially face another pandemic. One of the things that comes up a lot is whether to panic or not panic. And I find that uncomfortable. I think for public health officials, that’s not even the right question. I want them to tell us what’s going on, their information, and I want them to demonstrate competent response in a timely manner.

And when it comes to that, I have to say, I’m a little panicked because even though we have not had a major human outbreak with H5N1 yet, I think the way US institutions and US Public Health have been so behind the curve and so reluctant to share information with the scientific community and so late to try to get this under control has me a little worried.

The first known case was announced among cows on March 25, right? It’s been about a month. And we’re still lacking really important answers, like how widespread is it, really? When I started investigating this question, I talked to many, many US government officials, and I just couldn’t get really good answers from them. I would be hearing that it had spread from cattle farms back to poultry farms, and they don’t know how.

There have been very few genomes released until recently. And after a lot of pressure, they released a bunch of them. But they released it in this really unwieldy format, like raw sequences, and they don’t have any geographic information, like the time and date, which is really crucial. It’s been a month, and we don’t have these basic pieces of information. And I kept running into these, “we don’t know,” “we’re working on it,” “we’re going to release it.”

So I started calling up people on the ground. I started talking to people in Texas. I started talking to farm workers and public health officials on the ground. And when I called the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, he just straight up told me this has been around probably since February. He said that our herds were getting really sick, and we couldn’t figure it out.

And then they had a scientist called by a vet on the ground who kind of suspected this might be bird flu. And that initiative by these people on the ground a month later, at least maybe two, is what led to the detection that it was even the bird flu. And my jaw kind of fell on the floor because he was very straightforward, and he just was giving me all this information.

And he thought like, oh, this is just exaggerated because our cows have probably all had it. He thought 40 percent to 50 percent of the herds in the panhandle, which is where dairy cattle are, were already infected and had gotten over it, which is good news for the cows, but for people, that’s an incredibly dangerous moment because February is also a peak human influenza season.

So it means that just when human influenza was widespread, we had avian influenza among cows also widespread. And the influenza virus has a very interesting evolutionary trick. When two types of influenza viruses co-infect in the same host, they’re able to swap segments with each other, and then they swap their parts and become adapted to the other species.

On the one hand, it made me feel a little better about this virus because if it had been that widespread then and hadn’t had a major human spillover or an outbreak, that’s good because it probably means it’s not very prone to getting into humans, which is good to know. But if it had been, we would have been in such deep trouble. We wouldn’t even know what was happening until way later.

But the fact that after COVID, after all the criticisms we made of China for its delay in responding, not getting this under control, we could have unleashed something new into the world. I mean, it’s not just us because it would be terrible for us, but we have a responsibility to the whole world that we didn’t even share the information we had in a timely manner. So I found that really disappointing. And whatever’s going on there really needs to be fixed because luck is not a good plan when it comes to dealing with pandemic potential viruses like this.

Now, I have to say there is some good parts of our readiness. I talked to people in the vaccine readiness programs, and they really seemed like most on top of it. They had a lot of plans, and there’s already vaccine candidates match and there’s stockpiling. That’s great, but that’s a process that would take months to reach the population. And that’s a little like having great fire insurance, but that comes into play after your house is burnt down.

The most important thing is to prevent this from happening. So a big tool in our kit should be widespread testing because we had this criticism of the Trump administration. “If you don’t test it, it doesn’t exist,” was a motto of sorts. He even said it explicitly. And I’m thinking, what are we doing now? We are not testing widely until very recently. Just a couple of days ago, testing was almost entirely voluntary and only recommended for symptomatic cows. And we know that some of them aren’t showing symptoms.

A lot of the farm worker population in this industry is undocumented immigrants, Hispanic, poor, afraid of stigma, probably can’t just take 10 days off work. So we have to do things like really find a way to encourage the farm workers to report. And that has to include guarantees that they’re not going to be in legal trouble. It has to have compensation if they stop working. And we would also have to have a plan and that we should start right now to have rapid tests.

So these are the things that people who run these things, they know. Something’s not coming together between the CDC, the USDA, which oversees the animals, with the FDA that looks at food safety. The White House is leading it. It’s an election year.

A lot of things have to come together to make the response work. It has to come together into one coherent, united, synchronized response. And I think that’s what we’re missing, which is really frustrating because we’re a really wealthy country with large amounts of expertise. But things have clearly been damaged from the COVID pandemic, and we may be seeing the results of that play out.

• May 9, 2024   •   5:16 Trump on Trial: ‘The Odds of Conviction Have Gone Up’
• May 8, 2024 We Have a Housing Crisis. This New Jersey Town Has a Solution.
• May 6, 2024   •   6:17 I’m a Doctor. I Was Unprepared When I Got This Disease.
• May 2, 2024 Campus Protests Aren’t Going Away. Colleges Need to Draw Lines.
• May 1, 2024   •   8:07 Bird Flu Is Spreading. Did We Learn Nothing From Covid?
• April 26, 2024   •   6:10 Biden, Let the Protests of 1968 Be a Warning
• April 25, 2024   •   8:58 Closing the Gap Between Nature and the Self
• April 24, 2024 Biden’s Deep Miscalculation on Israel and Gaza
• April 18, 2024   •   6:12 After Decades on the Court, I Want a Divided America to Know This
• April 17, 2024 Have Faith in the Trump Trial Jurors
• April 13, 2024   •   5:53 Harvard Is Bringing Back Standardized Tests. Other Schools Should, Too.
• April 11, 2024   •   6:48 As Ramadan Ends, I Resist the Urge to Insulate

By Zeynep Tufekci

Produced by Vishakha Darbha

American dairy cows have been contracting avian flu, and inactive traces of the virus have been found in milk supplies across the country. The spread to humans has been very limited, but the Times Opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci argues that hoping for good luck is not a strategy for responding to potential pandemics and that government agencies need to do a better job of coordinating, testing and reporting their findings quickly.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Zeynep Tufekci  ( @zeynep ) is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a New York Times Opinion columnist. @ zeynep • Facebook