#In writing coherence means how to

In the first sentence, Thompson begins with an idea that is familiar to readers at three different levels. The robotics revolution began in factories in the 1960s and ’70s, but manufacturing employment kept rising until 1980, and then collapsed during the subsequent recessions. But employers typically take years to embrace new machines at the expense of workers.

One common objection to the idea that technology will permanently displace huge numbers of workers is that new gadgets, like self-checkout kiosks at drugstores, have failed to fully displace their human counterparts, like cashiers. Consider how Derek Thompson moves naturally between one concept to another in this short passage from his The Atlantic feature about the future of jobs entitled “A World Without Work”: Writers are always working to establish clear relationships between and within all of their ideas.

#In writing coherence means how to

In this page, we explore how to make your connections between ideas understandable by using common relationship categories to compose sentences that are cohesive, paragraphs that are coherent, and transitions that clearly order and introduce ideas.Ĭommon Kinds of Relationships Writers Establish between Ideas As a writer, it is your responsibility to make sure that your readers follow this progression, that they understand how you arrive at your various ideas and how those ideas relate to each other. These connections between ideas occur at the sentence, paragraph, section, and (for longer works) even chapter level. Good writing provides clear passages through all of your ideas so that readers don’t get lost or start to blaze their own conceptual trail. If the pathways and design of your writing aren’t clear to readers, readers will either get confused or frustrated or try to mistakenly intuit their own connections. In writing, this means that readers tend to assume that two side-by-side sentences or adjacent paragraphs relate to each other. According to poet and science writer Diane Ackerman, “one of the brain’s deepest needs to fill the world with pathways and our lives with a design.” We naturally look for how things are related.