Determinants 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.