Paragraph writing - Cohesion

Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will:

• Have an understanding of what cohesion is.

• Be more aware of the tools for improving
cohesion in a paragraph.
• Have had a go at improving a paragraph
• Have written your own cohesive paragraph
 Questions
1. What is cohesion?
2. What strategies do you use to build cohesion
between sentences?
3. How do we organize paragraphs and entire
essays?
 Cohesion
• Lexical cohesion
• Reference
• Substitution
• Ellipsis
• Linking words/ phrases

In academic writing you are expected to use

these cohesive devices.
 Lexical cohesion
How is cohesion achieved in the following text?
Other areas of difference between Japan and the United States involve issues of
group interaction and sense of space. Whereas people in the United States pride
themselves on individualism and informality, Japanese value groups and
formality. People in the United States admire and reward a person who rises
above the crowd; in contrast, a Japanese proverb says “the nail that sticks up
gets hammered down”. In addition, while North Americans’ sense of size and
scale developed out of the vastness of the continent, Japanese genius lies in the
diminutive and miniature. For example, the United States builds airplanes, while
Japan produces transistors.
(Oshima and Hogue, 2006: 112)
 Lexical cohesion
How is cohesion achieved in the following text?
Other areas of difference between Japan and the United States involve issues of
group interaction and sense of space. Whereas people in the United States pride
themselves on individualism and informality, Japanese value groups and
formality. People in the United States admire and reward a person who rises
above the crowd; in contrast, a Japanese proverb says “the nail that sticks up
gets hammered down”. In addition, while North Americans’ sense of size and
scale developed out of the vastness of the continent, Japanese genius lies in the
diminutive and miniature. For example, the United States builds airplanes, while
Japan produces transistors.
(Oshima and Hogue, 2006: 112)
 Reference
Read the following essay extract.
What nouns or noun phrases do the underlined words and
phrases refer to?

Luxemburg and Bolivia do not seem to have much in common. The former is a
comparatively prosperous European country; the latter is one of South America’s
poorest states. Both, however, are landlocked, and this has influenced their history in
ways which will be explored below.

Source: Paterson, K. (2013) Oxford Grammar for EAP. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 *Remember that this
can be used on its own
Reference to refer to a whole
idea. Look at the
following example:
• Personal pronouns (check the use of it’s/ its)
• Demonstrative pronouns (this*, these,
that, those)
• The same, both, some and respectively

Consumers now expect their favourite fruit and vegetables to

be available all around the year. This means that food must be
imported from great distances.
 Substitution
Which words or sentences do the underlined words substitute?

1. "When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.“

(Michel de Montaigne)

2. Niles: I'll have a decaf latte, and please be sure to use skim milk.
Frasier: I'll have the same.

3. "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise
up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits
them better."
(Abraham Lincoln)

4. "All generalizations are false, including this one."

(Mark Twain)
 Ellipsis
Identify where the writer has avoided repeating a noun by
leaving it out.

There are two reasons for the original growth of the cities.
The first was the process of industrialisation, where factories
required new workers.

A number of psychological experiments were carried

out at Yale University in the 1960s. Two of the most
interesting are explored by Blass (1999).

The first two trains of the day completed

their journey s without incident, but the
third was forced to stop outside London.
 Conjunctions

These are
just a few...

Accordingly Also Anyway Besides Consequently

Finally For Example For Instance Further Furthermore
Hence However Incidentally Indeed In Fact
Instead Likewise Meanwhile Moreover Namely
Now Of Course On the Contrary On the Other Hand
Otherwise
Nevertheless Next Nonetheless Similarly So Far
Until Now Still Then Therefore Thus
 Questions to ask yourself as you revise
Sentences
• Do your sentences "hang together"?
• Readers must feel that they move easily from one sentence to the next, that
each sentence "coheres" with the one before and after it.
• Readers must feel that sentences in a paragraph are not just individually clear,
but are unified with each other.
• Does the sentence begin with information familiar to the reader?
• Does the sentence end with interesting information the reader would not
anticipate?

Paragraphs
• Will your reader be able to identify quickly the "topic" of each paragraph?

Source: Purdue Online Writing Lab (2013) Revising for cohesion. Available at
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/561/04/ . Last accessed 11/7/2013.
 Academic articles
Hinkel, E. (2001) Matters of Cohesion in L2
Academic Texts. Applied Language Learning.
VoI. 12,No.2, pp. 111-132. Available at:
http://elihinkel.org/downloads/Cohesion.pdf
Last accessed 12/8/2013.