While both cohesion and coherence play crucial roles in creating clear and unified texts, they are not the same thing. Imagine cohesion as the threads that connect words and sentences, holding them together, while coherence is the woven pattern they form, making sense of the whole piece.

Cohesion

• Focuses on the surface level: how sentences are grammatically and lexically linked.
• Achieved through:
  • Grammatical devices: Pronouns, anaphora, ellipsis, conjunctions, transition words.
  • Lexical devices: direct repetition, synonyms, and hyper-/hyponyms.
  • Transitions - see Types of transitions
  • Theme and rheme
• Example: “The dog chased the cat. It (the cat) climbed a tree.” (Pronoun “it” links the sentences.)

Toolkit for writing more cohesively

Writing cohesively relates to how ideas connect with each other within a single paragraph and between separate paragraphs that align to a Problem Statement. There are a variety of ways to write more coherently:

1. Use of pronouns when their antecedents are clear and when pronouns are not overused - see Pronouns.
2. Use of direct repetition; that is, repeating the same word or phrase as long as it does not become repetitive.
3. Use of synonyms.
4. Use of hyper-/hyponyms.
5. Proper use of transitions to connect clauses and sentences - see Types of transitions and Sentence connectors by category.
6. Use of theme and rheme - seeUnderstanding Theme and Rheme in Writing.

Coherence – the basics

• Focuses on the deeper meaning: how ideas and information hang together logically and make sense to the reader.
• Achieved through:
  • Logical flow of ideas: cause-and-effect, chronological order, compare-and-contrast.
  • Shared knowledge and assumptions: background information, context, reader expectations.
  • Topic relevance: all content contributes to the central theme.
• Example: “The dog chased the cat, but it (the cat) cleverly outsmarted it by climbing a tree. After all, cats are known for their agility.” (Sentence explains why the cat climbed the tree and connects to the theme of cats’ abilities.)

Coherence – advanced

• Text coherence primarily relates to how ideas are organized throughout the text. Choosing the most appropriate rhetorical (or reasoning) patterns can oftentimes be the difference between a coherence and incoherence text. Rhetorical patterns include the following:
  • most important to the least important (or vice versa)
  • general to the specific
  • theoretical to the practical
  • chronological
  • process
  • spacial
  • categorical
  • compare and contrast
  • cause-and-effect
  • chain reasoning
  • etc.
• Text cohesion also relates to anaphoric, cataphoric, and exophoric referencing (Wikipedia).
  • Anaphoric reference occurs when the writer refers back to someone or something that has been previously identified, to avoid repetition. Some examples: replacing “the taxi driver” with the pronoun “he” or “two girls” with “they”. Another example can be found in formulaic sequences such as “as stated previously” or “the aforementioned”.
  • Cataphoric reference is the opposite of anaphora: a reference forward as opposed to backward in the discourse. Something is introduced in the abstract before it is identified. For example: “Here he comes, our award-winning host… it’s John Doe!” Cataphoric references can also be found in written text.
  • Exophoric reference is used to describe generics or abstracts without ever identifying them (in contrast to anaphora and cataphora): e.g. rather than introduce a concept, the writer refers to it by a generic word such as “everything”. The prefix “exo” means “outside”, and the persons or events referred to in this manner are never identified by the writer.
  • Note: Exophoric references only become non-cohesive if the referent is beyond the scope of understanding of the target audience.