Cohesion and Coherence in Academic Writing: From Lexical Choice To Organization

Abstract

Studies on cohesion or coherence often focus on a certain level of text, or the distinction between them. It would be beneficial to investigate, from the perspective of the writing process, how overt surface links contribute to the interpretation and communicative purpose of a text. This paper explores cohesion and coherence at three levels of academic text - lexicon, sentence structure, and organization of information. Lexical cohesive analysis suggests that sentences which are functionally more important to the thematic development of a text usually contain more cohesive ties with other sentences than sentences less important functionally. At the sentence level, equally grammatical sentences could carry different communicative values in a given text. Furthermore, the given/new information patterns in paragraphs of various rhetorical functions are identified. With regard to the organization of information, students need to develop their pragmatic competence in a number of academic genres and information unit types.