This is especially true in scholarly fields, where authors are writing for a very specific audience of experts anyone outside that audience is likely to see the work as incoherent. Since coherence is subjective, people will disagree about the examples. Examples in Literature and Scholarship Example 1 If an argument is not coherent, it doesn’t matter how good the evidence is, or how beautiful the writing is: an incoherent argument will never persuade anyone or even hold their attention. Coherence is perhaps the most important feature of argumentative writing. How can you avoid this in your own writing? How can you make sure that readers don’t misunderstand you (or just give up altogether)? The answer is to work on coherent writing. And as a result, you don’t get as much out of it as you otherwise would. But from your perspective, the chapter seems incoherent. To someone else, the writing might seem perfectly coherent, because they understand the concepts involved. This may become frustrating and often happens when a book is above your current level of understanding. Your brain is unable to find a unified argument or narrative in the book. Nine times out of ten, this is a symptom of incoherence. Maybe, after a while, you get frustrated and give up on the chapter. As you read, you find yourself drifting off, having to read the same sentence over and over before you understand it.
Say you’re reading a piece of academic writing – maybe a textbook. Each sentence flows into the next quite easily, and readers can follow the line of logic without too much effort.
To these readers, the paragraph will seem less coherent!Ĭlear transitions. Some readers, however, might not understand the term “interest rates,” and they would need an explanation. For most readers, the terms in this paragraph will be quite clear and will not need to be defined. In addition, the key term “ danger” appears in the topic sentence and is then explained fully as the paragraph goes on. Similarly, the word convenience (and related words) are also peppered throughout. This signals the reader that the whole paragraph is about the subject of credit cards. The term “credit card” appears repeatedly in this short paragraph. Everything in the paragraph is tied back to the statement in the beginning. The paragraph starts with a very clear, declarative topic sentence, and the rest of the paragraph follows that sentence. If you’re not careful, credit card debt can quickly break the bankand leave you in very dire economic circumstances! The more money you put on your credit card, the more the bank or credit union will charge you for that convenience. However, this convenience comes at a high price: interest rates. This is especially helpful for purchases like cars, kitchen appliances, etc., that you may need to get without delay. People often get them in order to make large purchases easily without saving up lots of money in advance. Most people would agree that this is a fairly coherent paragraph:Ĭredit cards are convenient, but dangerous. Let’s look at an extended example and go through some of the features that make it seem coherent. There are many distinct features that help create a sense of coherence. A piece of writing is coherent if and only if the reader thinks it is. This means it’s a completely subjective judgement. However, in this context the term is extremely vague, so we’ll focus on formal essays for the sake of simplicity.Ĭoherence is, in the end, a matter of perception. When you write coherent paragraphs, the argument as a whole will usually seem coherent to your readers.Īlthough coherence is primarily a feature of arguments, you may also hear people talk about the “coherence” of a story, poem, etc.Most people can already write a fairly coherent sentence, even if their grammar is not perfect.Sentence-level coherence is a matter of grammar, and it would take too long to explain all the features of coherent grammar.However, we’ll be focused on the paragraph level in this article. It’s an extremely important quality of formal writing.Ĭoherence is relevant to every level of organization, from the sentence level up to the complete argument.
Without coherence, a discussion may not make sense or may be difficult for the audience to follow. Coherence describes the way anything, such as an argument (or part of an argument) “hangs together.” If something has coherence, its parts are well-connected and all heading in the same direction.
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