Definition:
The use of transitional expressions and other stylistic devices to guide readers and show how the parts of a composition relate to one other. Adjective: cohesive. See also: coherence.
Etymology:
From the Latin, "cling together"Observations:
- "Cohesion is achieved when writers connect their organized parts with sufficiently clear and numerous signals--like the words 'finally,' 'thus,' 'however,'--to make the development of their cases intelligible and to lead the reader safely along the emrging lines of their arguments. . . .
"[W]riting must have not only coherence, an effective design, but cohesion, an explicit set of 'hooks' and 'ties' that ensure a reader's interest and comprehension. Coherence is the kind of 'holding together' that a good design will give any discourse, whether written or spoken. Cohesion is the result of giving readers the right kind of explicit help in figuring out the design. Cohesion gives readers the clues for discovering coherence."
(Wayne C. Booth and Marshall W. Gregory, The Harper & Row Rhetoric: Writing as Thinking/Thinking as Writing, 1987) - "In linguistics, [cohesion is] the use of language forms to indicate semantic relations between elements in a discourse. Grammatical cohesion concerns such matters as reference, ellipsis, substitution, and conjunction; lexical cohesion concerns such features as synonymy, antonymy, metonymy, collocation, repetition, etc.; instantial cohesion concerns ties that are valid only for a particular text. Together, cohesion and register contribute to textuality, the sense that something is a text and not a random collection of sentences."
(Tom Michael McCarthy and Tom McArthur, "Cohesion," The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford University Press, 1992)
Pronunciation: ko-HE-zhen
