Coherence
and CohesionCoherence
and Cohesion
1. 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 a hovercraft, have no wheels. Wheels go round.
2. Suzie left the howling ice cube in the bitter bicycle and it melted. It soon tinkled merrily in her martini. Into her drink she then also poured the grand piano she had boiled in a textbook of mathematics the night before. She chewed the martini, read the olive and went to bed. But first she took her clothes off. She then took her clothes off.
3. Keiko was playing outside when she heard the cry, “Abekawa mochi. Oishii desu yo.” She stopped playing, jumped up, ran into the house and locked the door.
Is this passage coherent and/or cohesive to you? Why or why not?
4. The net bulged with the lightning shot. The linesman blew his whistle and signaled. Smith had been offside. The two coaches both muttered something. The goalkeeper sighed with relief.
Cohesion is the term for overt links on the textual surface such as those in 1, 2, and 3, whereas coherence is the quality that allows you to understand a text because it fits into your world view. As we can see from these four passages, repetition of key nouns, and good use of transition signals do not ensure coherence in a passage. Our readers must share with us a sufficiently common background or world view in order to make sense out of our writing. For that reason soccer or ice hockey fans can make perfect sense of passage 4.
Enkvist, N.E. "Seven Problems in the Study of Coherence and Interpretability." In U. Connor and A.M. Johns, eds. Coherence in Writing: Research and Pedagogical Perspectives. Alexandria, Virginia: TESOL, 1990.
