Coherence refers to the semantic unity created between the ideas, sentences, paragraphs and sections of a piece of writing.Ĭohesion represents the grammatical and lexical relationship between different elements of a text which hold it together. Rather than the text appearing linked together perfectly, it is the overall impression of the text that appears to be smooth and clear. If the readers can follow and understand a text easily, it obviously has coherence. When the text begins to make sense on the whole, it is said to be coherent. It is a quality of a piece of text that makes it meaningful in the minds of the readers. Coherence is based more on the logic of the ideas and how they are presented rather than on the language that is used to express these ideas.

When writing an essay, coherence involves such features as: summarizing the overall argument of an essay in the introductory paragraph presenting ideas in a logical sequence putting separate, major points into separate paragraphs and beginning each paragraph with a 'topic sentence', following by supporting sentences. The cohesion of writing, on the other hand, focuses on the “grammatical” aspects of writing.Ĭoherence is a “reasonable connection or relation between ideas, arguments, statements, etc.” It means the overall 'understandability' of what you write or say. thesis statement development), synthesizing and integrating readings, organizing and clarifying ideas. On the one hand, coherence refers to the “rhetorical” aspects of your writing, which include developing and supporting your argument (e.g. While c oherence means the connection of ideas at the idea level, cohesion means the connection of ideas at the sentence level. Cohesion refers to connectivity in a text, but coherence refers to how easy it is to understand the writing. A text is cohesive if its elements are linked together. These links may be based on the speakers’ shared knowledge.Cohesion and coherence are two different things. Coherence is therefore the relationships which link the meanings of utterances in a discourse or of the sentences in a text, (Richard and Schmidt, 2010,p.93).

Tanskanen (2006:p.7) argues that coherence is the outcome of a dialogue between the text and its listener/reader. Manser (2006:p.141) argues that coherence is a feature of good style. Cohesion may refer to the ways in which sentences are connected by cohesive devices through which readers can perceive the semantic relationship between the sentences, (Suwandi, 2016:p.255). For Hatim and Munday (2004:p.335), coherence is a standard which all well-formed texts must meet and which stipulates that grammatical and/or lexical relationships ‘hang together’ and make overall sense as text. Van Dijk (1977:p.93) points out that the notion of coherence can be defined as a semantic property of discourse. They are like the glue which holds different parts of a text together and the only factor in making a text coherent.Ĭoherence is the spirit of the text, it's what makes the text semantically meaningful, and is considered the most significant element in text linguistics. They are necessary in linking the sentences together. Cohesive devices are defined by Salkie (2005:p.9) as those certain words and expressions which any cohesive text should include. It refers to the different cohesive devices that are necessary for any text units to be strongly connected together.

Yule (1985:p.140) defines cohesion as the ties and connections which exist within texts. As for Hatim and Munday (2004:p.336), cohesion is the requirement that a sequence of sentences display grammatical and/or lexical relationships which ensure the surface continuity of text structure. In the view of Beaugrande and Dressler (1981:p.55–56), lexical recurrence (repetition) contributes to cohesion. Although cohesion plays a pivotal role in textuality, there must be interaction between cohesion and other standards of textuality to make communication efficient (Abdul-Raof, 2019:p.20). This means that the surface components (words) of the text depend upon each other according to grammatical forms and conventions, i.e., the words are mutually connected within a sequence. For Beaugrande and Dressler (1981:p.3), cohesion depends on grammatical dependencies. Thus, there is grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion (Abdul-Raof, 2019:p.20). Cohesion is expressed partly through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary. It is the grammatical or lexical relationship that binds different parts of a text together. For Halliday and Hasan (1976:p.4–5), cohesion is a semantic relation and is defined as the relations of meaning that exist within the text and that define it as a text.

Coherence vs cohesion