Coherence and Cohesion in Academic Writing

Session Objectives To raise participants’ awareness of coherence and cohesion in academic writing To enable participants identify the problems of coherence and cohesion in written texts To focus on different kinds of cohesive devices, namely reference, conjunctions, and repetition

Lead in What is cohesion? What is coherence? What is the role of coherence and cohesion in academic writing? What kind of cohesive devices do you usually use in your writing? What kind of cohesive devices do your students use in their writing?

Identifying the meaning of pronouns Even worse is the third type of irresponsibility which is very dangerous to a large number of people such as the prime minister proposing an unsuitable policy to parliament and getting it accepted; then implemented it in his country. Both articles are very well written but Sandra's article speaks more to the Egyptian audience due to the fact of its easy format. The format is more attractive, because all their lives have studied their material in point form. They depended on memorizing instead of thinking and that was caused by the Egyptian education system, which made them prefer the point form topics more than any other topics.

Identifying the meaning of conjunctions While one group (Group A) will be exposed to one treatment, the other group (Group B) will be exposed to the other treatment. However, each group will be exposed to both treatments twice altogether in the study. Both in American English and New Zealand English, agreement is the most common response type. However, studies show agreement response included other strategies, such as: appreciation token, comment acceptance, praise upgrade, comment history, reassignment, and return compliment.

Introduction to cohesion According to Halliday and Hasan(1976), there are six main ways that cohesion is created in a text: Reference Substitution  Ellipsis  Lexical Chains  Cohesive Nouns  Conjunction

??? In this way of creating cohesion you can use: synonyms (e.g., "beautiful" for “lovely”);  hyponyms and superordinates (e.g., "daffodil", "rose" and "daisy“ for "flower“); Lexical chains are created in a text by using words in the same lexical set (e.g., "army", "soldiers", "barracks", "weapons".) These techniques allow for the central themes to be reiterated in a way that avoids monotony for the reader.

??? This way of creating cohesion occurs when we omit words because they are understood from the context e.g., "John can type and I can [type] too!", "I don't want to go out, do you?" [want to go out] 

??? This way of creating cohesion uses a word/phrase to replace a word/phrase used earlier. For instance "the one(s)" and "the same" can be used to replace nouns (e.g., "I'll have the same.") Verbs can be replaced by "do" (e.g., "The authorities said they had acted, but nobody believed they had done."). In speaking, whole clauses can be replaced by, "so" or "not" (e.g., "I hope so/not.")

??? These words are a kind of lexical reference. They can summarise many words in one (e.g., "attitude", "solution", "difficulty"), and have been called 'umbrella' nouns for this reason (Bailey 2006:150). They are used to signal what is to come (e.g., "the problem to be discussed..."), or can refer back (e.g., "The issue mentioned above...").

??? This way of creating cohesion  includes listing words such as, "firstly", "next", "lastly"; linkers for addition (e.g., "moreover", "and", "also"); concession (e.g., "but", "however", "despite"); and cause and effect (e.g., "so", "because, "as a result").

??? This way of creating cohesion uses determiners (e.g., "this", "that", "these" and "those"); pronouns (e.g., "him", "them", "me"); possessive pronouns (e.g., "your", "their", "hers"); relative pronouns (e.g., "which", "who", "whose"). This type of cohesion can also be achieved comparatively with expressions like: "similarly", "likewise", "less".