Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources of extracts used in the text
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Reflection and Research
- Part II The Dynamics of an Essay
- Part III Language
- 7 You, your language and your material
- 8 Analytical language I: sentences
- 9 Analytical language 2: rhetorical strategies
- 10 Cohesion and texture
- 11 Conventions of academic writing
- Appendices
- Index
10 - Cohesion and texture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources of extracts used in the text
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Reflection and Research
- Part II The Dynamics of an Essay
- Part III Language
- 7 You, your language and your material
- 8 Analytical language I: sentences
- 9 Analytical language 2: rhetorical strategies
- 10 Cohesion and texture
- 11 Conventions of academic writing
- Appendices
- Index
Summary
… to combine textural appeal with an appropriate scheme of textual cohesion, in such a way that one supports the other, is a fundamental stylistic task. The text, however, has primacy; plot is more important than diction, though diction may be involved in plot.
walter nashDeterminants of cohesion and texture
A coherent essay depends in the first instance, as we have seen in many preceding chapters, on the careful formulation of the case to be argued. If your answer to the question posed is conceived as a ‘golden thread’ that runs right through the piece of writing, it is in the answer itself and its various implications that the beginnings of coherence lie. But once you have decided on your answer, you cannot assume that there is some natural order of thought that produces in your essay a coherence that is above and beyond the details of the words you use. It is in your disposition of grammatical structures and in your choice and deployment of those words that you bring your text together. To work at this is to produce COHESION and TEXTURE in your writing.
Text consists in your attempts to bring all the elements of your writing together into a unified whole.
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- Information
- The Student's Writing Guide for the Arts and Social Sciences , pp. 204 - 217Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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