Coherence in Essay Writing

As a complex skill that is not easy to teach, writing has inspired teacher to search for teaching strategy which would be able to assist students write better. It is, then, essential to develop the ability to write the good essay. Writing essay is a significant production skill, integrating both composing and organization skills. In order to write a good quality essay, a careful writing plan should be adapted to ensure proper requirement. Renkema 1993 mentions as follows:

            Whatever rhetorical pattern operation is taken, a writer of academic writing has to be sure that the sequence of sentences he writes has textuality elements that make the sequences of sentences an academic text: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativeness, suitability and intertextuality.

            In discourse studies, not all criteria are considered equally important. Of the seven, coherence and cohesion require particular concentration in discourse studies.  Murcia and Olshtain (2000: 235) define coherence as the unity a piece of discourse such that individual sentences or utterances are connected to each other and form a meaningful whole with the respect to the context of situation, even when the connections are not explicitly made.

            Coherence contributes to the unity of a piece of discourse such that the individual sentences or utterances hang together and relate to each other. Each sentence or utterance is related both to previous and following sentences in ways that lead the reader toward an easier and more effective interpretation of the text. Coherence, for that reason, has significant influence to create a meaningful and logical text.

            For the academic purposes, writing is an impetus to present the quality of proficiency. In this respect, the ability to write is a must for those who are involved in the academic atmosphere. Budiharso (2005:1) reveals that when writing, the students must keep in mind their purpose, think about the facts they will need to select which are relevant to that purpose, and think about how recognize those facts in a coherent fashion. The ability to write a clear, concise, logical and convincing paragraph or essay involves more than just the ability to be able to write a grammatical sentence; it also requires knowledge of acceptability English coherence.

            Considering that the way to achieve coherence in writing essay should be understood well by students especially in the university level to help them in order to be able write essay effectively. This paper presents viewpoints discussing the valuable way of writing essay by explaining the explicit techniques to achieve coherent writing. By helping the students to find out the explicit techniques to achieve coherent writing, it is expected that they would be able to express their critical thinking and ideas in such kind of the good essay so that they can apply it in their real life and context. Thus, in the end writing essay would be more practicable and meaningful based on the students’ needs and interest.