By Dana P Skopal, PhD
Writers draft their message for their reader, but are they aware if their message is clear, coherent and cohesive? We have written about structuring your message and how coherence covers both the ordering of key points as well as links between sentences. We have also written about the importance of understanding nouns, as a writer tells the reader about the ‘what’ – with descriptive words around a noun (nominal group). It is the links between the words in sentences and paragraphs that make a message clear, and linguists refer to this as cohesive chains.
Cohesion can occur through grammatical or lexical structures. Relating to grammar, one simple way is to think about how you use pronouns. In the nursery rhyme, we say, ‘three blind mice, see how they run’. After the noun ‘mice’ we have the pronoun ‘they’. Next, writers use conjunctions to link their clauses, for example, using ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘then’.
Lexical cohesive devices enable a writer to link context specific wording. A common way is to use synonyms – words of similar meaning – for example ‘system’ and ‘network’, or even repeat the same word, especially if the word has a special technical meaning. Another approach is the relation between whole and parts, known as meronymy: a building as a whole, with parts of ‘wall, roof, and doors’. Another format is lexical scatter, where words have the same base: decide / deciding / decision / decisive.
An additional way to think about cohesion is to look for cohesive chains. This can be illustrated through colour coding a text. The following is an extract from one of our published research papers. The word ‘information’ is key and is repeated (pink colouring). Lexical scatter occurs with the terms ‘writing’ and ‘reformulating’. ‘Organizations’ and ‘workplaces’ can be viewed as synonymous. Note: the acronym PID stands for public information documents, which is explained earlier in the article.
“Public regulatory information is produced principally in large government organizations; and writing, or reformulating information, in these professional based workplaces is viewed as professional writing (Bhatia 1999; Smart 2006). The information contained in texts such as PIDs can be reformulated by workplace writers from one communicative event to another. Such reformulation is viewed as recontextualization, which is defined as the operational transfer of information from one situated discourse and/or text to another, or as a process that can assign new meaning(s) in that new context (Bazerman 2004; Linell 1998).”
References
Flowerdew. (2013). Chapter 3: Cohesion. In Taylor & Francis (Eds.), Discourse in English language education. Routledge.
See p. 143 in Skopal, D. P. & Herke, M. (2017). Public discourse syndrome: reformulating for clarity. Text & Talk, 37(1), 141-164. doi: 10.1515/text-2016-0041
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