Basic Techniques in Technical Writing
Examples and Observations:
"The big parts of a story should stick together, but the small parts need some stickum as well. When the big parts fit, we call that good feeling coherence; when sentences connect, we call it cohesion."
(Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Little, Brown, 2006)
Cohesion Analysis
"The linguistic method perhaps most fully applied to the field of composition studies is what is generally called cohesion analysis. According to a comprehensive treatment of this method--Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's Cohesion in English[1976]--cohesion is a semantic concept that 'occurs when the interpretation of some element in thediscourse is dependent on that of another' (4). . . . At its simplest, cohesion refers to the ways in which texts are 'stuck together'--the ways in which sentences are linked or connected by various linguistic and semantic ties."
(Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies, ed. by Mary Lynch Kennedy. Greenwood Press, 1998)
Cohesion and Coherence
"Until the mid 1970s, cohesion and coherence were often used interchangeably, both referring either to a kind of vague sense of wholeness or to a more specific set of relationships definable grammatically and lexically. The work of Halliday and Hasan (1976) influenced scholars and researchers in rhetoric and composition so that, by the early 1980s, the two terms were distinguished. Cohesion is now understood to be a textual quality, attained through the use of grammatical and lexical elements that enable readers to perceive semantic relationships within and between sentences. Coherence refers to the overall consistency of a discourse--its purpose, voice, content, style, form, and so on--and is in part determined by readers' perceptions of texts, dependent not only on linguistic and contextual information in the texts but also on readers' abilities to draw upon other kinds of
"The big parts of a story should stick together, but the small parts need some stickum as well. When the big parts fit, we call that good feeling coherence; when sentences connect, we call it cohesion."
(Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Little, Brown, 2006)
Cohesion Analysis
"The linguistic method perhaps most fully applied to the field of composition studies is what is generally called cohesion analysis. According to a comprehensive treatment of this method--Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's Cohesion in English[1976]--cohesion is a semantic concept that 'occurs when the interpretation of some element in thediscourse is dependent on that of another' (4). . . . At its simplest, cohesion refers to the ways in which texts are 'stuck together'--the ways in which sentences are linked or connected by various linguistic and semantic ties."
(Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies, ed. by Mary Lynch Kennedy. Greenwood Press, 1998)
Cohesion and Coherence
"Until the mid 1970s, cohesion and coherence were often used interchangeably, both referring either to a kind of vague sense of wholeness or to a more specific set of relationships definable grammatically and lexically. The work of Halliday and Hasan (1976) influenced scholars and researchers in rhetoric and composition so that, by the early 1980s, the two terms were distinguished. Cohesion is now understood to be a textual quality, attained through the use of grammatical and lexical elements that enable readers to perceive semantic relationships within and between sentences. Coherence refers to the overall consistency of a discourse--its purpose, voice, content, style, form, and so on--and is in part determined by readers' perceptions of texts, dependent not only on linguistic and contextual information in the texts but also on readers' abilities to draw upon other kinds of