Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
executable file
·
65 lines (45 loc) · 4.52 KB

05-Coherence-I.md

File metadata and controls

executable file
·
65 lines (45 loc) · 4.52 KB

Coherence I

  • Topic and Theme strings

  • Paragraph = Issue + Discussion

The Five Principles

  1. A cohesive paragraph has consistent topic strings
  2. A cohesive paragraph has another set of strings running through it that we will call thematic strings.
  3. A cohesive paragraph introduces new topic and thematic strings in a predictable location: at the end of the sentence that introduce the paragraph.
  4. A coherent paragraph will usually have a single sentence that clearly articulates its point.
  5. A coherent paragraph will typically locate that point sentence in one of two places.

This chapter covers the first three principles.

Topic Strings

  • Focus the reader's attention on a limited set of referents, usually charactors, but also central repeated concepts.
  • By consistent topics, we don't mean identical. The topics should constitute a sequence that make consistent sense to the reader.
  • Choose the topic to design the reader's attention on a paticular point of view.

Thematic Strings

  • Themes: sets of conceptually related words.

  • Thematic strings: sequences of them that run through the paragraph.

  • The words in the topic strings and the words in the thematic strings are not mutually exclusive.

Together, topic strings and the thematic strings consistute the conceptual architecture of a passage, the frame within which you develop new ideas.

  • Topic strings focus your reader's attention on what a passage is globally about.
  • The thematic strings give your reader a sense that you are focusing on a core of ideas of related to those topics.

Bad Thematic Strings: Diffuse Strings (unfocused)

  • only implicit or the writer uses no single word to pull together concepts that may seem to a reader wholly unrelated.
  • e.g. many diferent words and phrases for just few concepts. ("Vary your word choice" is a bad advice.)

Signaling Topics and Themes

  • Principle of design: Introduce new themes not anywhere in a sentence, but rather as close to its end as we can manage.

  • We use the concluding stress position not only to emphasize important words that we think are important in that single sentence, but to signal that we intend to develop new themes in the sentences that follow.

Complex Introductions

Good readers often introduce a paragraph with more than a single sentence.

Paragraph = Issue + Discussion

Readers always try to devide paragraphs, sections or wholes into two sections:

  • A short opening segment. Towards the end of this segment, in the stress position of the last sentence, readers look for the concepts the writer will discuss in the following section. Those words are often topics, but they must also include themes.
  • A longer following segment--the rest of the paragraph. In this segment, the writer develops--and readers look for--new ideas against a background of repeated topics and themes.

The issue of a paragraph is not its ideas, its concepts or its subject. The issue of a paragraph, of a section, or of a document is its introductory segment. The discussion typically explains, elaborates, supports, qualifies, argues for what the writer started in the issue. The issue promises; the discussion delivers.

The whole document should be short, much shorter than what it introduces.

Problems and Fixes

Problems:

  1. At the end of the issue, you introduce a concept that readers take to begin a theme, but you then fail to develop that concept in the discussion. (surplus topic)
  2. Conversely, you fail to anticipate in the issue important themes that you in fact develop in the discussion. (missing topic)
  3. At the end of the issue, you introduce a concept that readers think promises a theme, but in the discussion, you develop that concept using terms so varied that readers cannot connect them to your announced theme. (unfocused theme)
  4. You mention in the issue those themes that you develop in the discussion, but you bury the references to them inside a sentence, instead of highlighting them in the stress of the final sentence of the issue. (weak theme)

Fixes:

  1. Look at the discussion indepentently of the issue and ask what themes in fact the paragraph develops. Then revise the end of the issue to include any thematic strings that are present in and important to that paricular discussion. (make up topic)
  2. Deliberately weave into the discussion whatever important thematic strings you framed in the issue but omitted from the discussion. (make up theme)
  3. Delete from the issue whatever you don't want to develop in the discussion. (delete topic)