What’s the difference between coherence and cohesion!? vcestudyguides.com/whats-the-difference-between-coherence-and-cohesion/ vcestudyguides.com /whats-the-difference-between-coherence-and-cohesion/
Dmitri Dalla-Riva
22/4/2015
As an English Language tutor, tutor, I get asked this question quite frequently. frequently. It’s more of a conundrum than one would initially think. However, However, once dissected into an understandable answer, it should therefore make sense. Recall that both coherence and cohesion come under the subsystem of discourse. discourse. COHERENCE – SEMANTIC PROPERTY Coherence is a quality of a piece of text that makes it meaningful in the minds of the readers. When the text begins to make sense on the whole, it is said to be coherent. If the readers can follow and understand a text easily, it obviously has coherence. Rather than the text appearing linked together perfectly, perfectly, it is the overall impression of the text that appears to be smooth and clear. Coherence can be achieved through the use of titles, subtitles, paragraphing, formatting, logical ordering, orthography (spelling, punctuation, capitalisation) and so forth. For example, this article itself is coherent as it has proper paragraphs that are logically ordered from one another, it has proper subtitles to d ivide the text into coherence and cohesion, and it makes use of bolding and capitalisation to signal important parts. Inference is very important in achieving coherence, because sometimes in a text the reader may need to have prior knowledge about a subject. So while a text may appear coherent to one person, it may appear incoherent to another person (possibly because of lack of prior knowledge, or can’t infer it). However, However, even in this case, the text may be cohesive, because the sentences join well together, create meaning and flow on from each other other.. So you could have an incoherent text, but a cohesive text (just to make things more confusing!) COHESION – FLOW OF A TEXT Cohesion can be thought of as glue sticking different parts of furniture so that it takes the shape the writer wants it to give.
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Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it meaning. In short, the links that stick different sentences and make the text meaningful can be thought of as cohesion in the text. Establishing connections between sentences, sections, and even paragraphs using synonyms, adverbials, conjunctions etc. is what brings cohesion in a text. For example, have you ever wondered WHY your teacher keeps telling us to use adverbials within your essay body paragraphs (e.g. furthermore, in addition, similarly, likewise etc). These all add flow to the text. Consider this cohesive example: John went to the shops and he bought an ice-cream then ate it. Now let’s
remove the cohesion (flow)
in this text and see what happens.
John went to the shops. John bought an ice-cream. John ate the ice-cream. A little repetitive and monotonous, right? As can be seen in the cohesive example above, three cohesive devices have been used: 1. Ellipsis (‘he’ has been omitted in ‘then [he] ate it’) 2. Conjunctions (‘and’ to join the sentences together) 3. Substitution (John becomes ‘he’, and the ice-cream becomes ‘it’) Well, there you have it! This should now easily allow you to distinguish between coherence and cohesion! Copyright © 2016 VCE Study Guides
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