Cohesion in Writing

Besides coherence, evaluation on the unity of a text is also based on cohesion. Murcia and Olsthain (2000:235) defines cohesion results from the use of various cohesive devices (e.g. reference, repetition, substitution) to explicitly link together all the proportions in a text. Cohesive devices are words or phrases that act as signals to the reader making connections with what had already been stated or soon will be stated. Halliday and Hasan (1980) maintain that cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text. The relations are created through the use of cohesive devices which consist of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesions. Therefore, cohesion may be defined as the grammatical and/or lexical relationships between the different elements of a text, which holds across sentences or clauses.

Connor (1996:83) defines cohesion as the use of explicit linguistic devices to signal relations between sentences and parts of text. Cohesive devices are words or phrases that act as signals to the reader making connection with what had already been stated or soon will be stated. Cohesion is determined by lexical and grammatical relationship. Five general categories applicable for cohesion analysis are referential, ellipsis, substitution, lexical, and conjunctive.  Following Connor (1996:84) shows the example of each these devices which presents five categories of cohesion:

1.       Reference “John makes good meals. Last night he cooked spaghetti.”

2.      Substitution “I want an ice cream cone. Do you want one?”

3.      Ellipsis “Would you like to hear another verse? I know twelve (verses) more.”

4.      Lexical cohesion “There is a boy climbing that tree.”

a.       The boy is going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

b.      The child is going to fall …

c.       The idiot’s going to fall …

5.      Conjunction “For the whole day he climbed up the steep mountainside, almost without stopping. And in all this time he met no one.”

6.       

Most studies on coherence and cohesion note that cohesive texts are not necessarily also coherent texts. Conversely, a coherent text is also cohesive, but it does not mean that coherence is created by cohesion. Connor (1996) reports two studies evaluating the relationship between coherence and cohesion. Witte and Faigley (1981) discovered that relationship between cohesion and coherence is presented in writing of college students. However, Tieney and Mosenthal (1983) found no relationship between cohesion and coherence in American twelfth grade students’ essays. The following example of a text (Witte and Faigley, 1981:201) shows a cohesive text that is not coherent.

“The quarterback threw the ball toward the tight end. Balls are used in many sports. Most balls are spheres, but a football is an ellipsoid.  The fight end leaped to catch the ball. “(Quoted from Connor, 1996:83)

The word “ball” in the above text provides the cohesion of these lines, but this cohesive passage sounds incoherent to the reader. The first sentence uses the word “ball” to indicate the topic of the text. In the next text, the word “ball” appears in every sentence, but it does not support to each other. As a result, the word “ball” is used cohesively, but each word deviates from the topic; they are not coherent.

            It is true that, in principle, cohesion is neither necessary nor sufficient to create coherence, yet in practice a discourse of any length will employ it. That most coherence text are also cohesive, however, does not imply that coherence is created by cohesion. Clearly, a text may have: (1) cohesion but not coherence, as following:

My car is black. Black English was a controversial subject in the seventies. At seventy most people have retired. To re-tire means, “to put new tires on a vehicle.” Some vehicles such as hovercraft have no wheels. Wheels go around. (Enkvist in Connor and Johns, 1990:12).

(2) coherence although it lacks overt, describable cohesion markers, as the following:

                        The net bulged with the lightning shot. The referee blew his whistle and signaled. Smith had been offside. The two captains both muttered something. The goalkeeper sighed for relief. (Enkvist in Connor and Johns, 1990:12).

Text (2) has  a value of coherence although it has no existing connectivity. Clearly, (2) is a text around which a football-wise reader can build a consistent word picture a scenario or text world-in which the text makes sense.

To summarize, good writing requires good grammar and organization. Furthermore, academic writing, both at the paragraph and overall composition level, must satisfy the value of coherence if it is to meet the quality of written discourse. Coherence is achieved when there is a clear transition between all sentences in a paragraph, and when all the sentences are clearly and closely connected to each other. Coherence deals with the mechanical devices by which all the sentences are linked to each other (Corbett, 1977; Mc Crimon, 1967; Connor, 1996; and Oshima and Hogue, 1991).