Cohesion

It is important to develop in students an awareness of the different ways that the meanings in one sentence in a text are connected with the meanings in other sentences.

There are a number of different ways of showing connections between sentences.

These include:

• the use of reference words such as pronouns (it, he, she, this, those etc.) and the use of articles (first reference may be with ‘a’ and the next references to the same thing with ‘the’)
• the use of words referring to the same thing; either the same word repeated or synonyms or class terms used
• the use of connecting words to show the relationship in meaning such as ‘also’, ‘as a result’ and ‘in contrast’
• the use of substitution words such as ‘such’ or ‘so’ that take the place of whole phrases or sentences
• the omission of words that the reader is expected to understand because they were used in a previous sentence