Ways to Master Coherence in English Grammar

If you are at least somehow familiar with basic rules of writing academically, then you probably know about these two terms: coherence and cohesion. If not, they signify two main features of a text that make it consistent. Coherence can be described as the presence of logical connections in the text between its different parts. People can apply this term to both spoken or written language, but here we will talk specifically about mastering coherence in writing. Before that we find it necessary to dwell a bit more on its purpose.

Why we need coherence

Everything that a writer or a speaker ever does he does for the sake of his audience. If nobody ever heard or read the texts, there would be no reason to create them. Therefore, coherence is the main tool of letting other people understand your thoughts. When they are scattered across a piece of paper, it is very hard to grasp the main idea. Just imagine a book with no paragraphs in it, but with endless words and sentences that flow one into another.

Students who study literature may be familiar with the masterpiece by James Joyce called Ulysses. The fact is that the novel contains a sentence of more than 3 thousand words (and mind you, this is not the record in literature!) However, the author chose a rather tricky way to create such a long sentence – he simply omitted the necessary punctuation marks. What do you think are the chances of you comprehending the meaning of that writing? By the way, if you are willing to analyze this or any other literary work in a paper, this article may be of help: https://royalediting.com/7-things-you-need-to-know-about-essays-on-literature.

Readers’ satisfaction – that what makes it important for writers to organize their thoughts and ideas into something logical, structured and grammatically correct. We guess now nobody would doubt the necessity of mastering coherence, and we can move on to the practical tips that our paper editing website has in store for you.

Tips how to make any text coherent

1. Make sure every paragraph has a topic sentence.

A topic sentence in expository writing is a sentence that reveals the main idea of a paragraph and usually comes in the beginning. Writing this sentence is not enough to achieve coherence, but it brings you a step closer to the goal. The more difficult part here is to organize the rest of the paragraph in a way so that it revolves around the topic sentence and maintains its focus. Interested in details of creating perfect paragraphs? Follow this link to learn more: https://royalediting.com/best-advice-how-to-craft-perfect-paragraphs.

There are situations where this advice will do no good, but can even bring harm to the text. This, for example, can happen when a fiction writer tries to write novels in accordance with these rules. But what everyone should remember is that we are learning how to write academic papers here, therefore this advice will have the maximum effect only if you apply it to college essays.

2. Interconnect your sentences.

To make sure that all the sentences within one paragraph suit the same purpose, try linking them together with something more than merely a common idea. Thus, you can employ lexical and stylistic devices to add a sense of unity to every paragraph. Here is what exactly can be done:

Repeat the same word or phrase several times throughout a paragraph. Don’t overuse this method, simply note that this is one of the techniques to rely on.
Include synonyms or antonyms. This is a more sophisticated way compared with the tip above. It makes language diverse, yet contributes to establishing coherence.
Try enumeration in any form: as homogeneous parts of the sentence or bulleted lists.

Any other devices will be welcome too, provided they are applicable to academic style. Thus, leave assonance and alliteration to poetry, but feel free to use parallelism. Our professional proofreading and editing services pay special attention to verifying whether all the stylistic devices in students’ essays look normal and natural for academia.

3. Think over the transitions.

There are a lot of words in English that can act as links between different ideas. Here we are talking about parentheses for the most part. They are a perfect choice for a college essay because they present one of the basic ways to organize a text.

Every logical part of a paper requires its own type of transitions. To enumerate ideas, use words like firstly, secondly, then and so on. To provide more support to some argument, try these ones: additionally, moreover, furthermore. When it is time to give examples, include one of the next transitions: for example, to illustrate, for instance. This is just the top of the iceberg, for you to grasp the idea. There are many more transitions in English that have various functions in a text.

How to check whether you succeeded

Let’s imagine you have fulfilled all the steps we mentioned above, but now it is time to check how efficiently it was done. Here is a quick plan how to check your text for coherence:

Analyze the essay paragraph by paragraph. Do the paragraph breaks come in natural places? Does every paragraph focus only on one aspect of the problem?
And now read the paper from the beginning till the end without any pauses. Does it give you a sense of completeness and unity?
Think about your impressions. Can you tell straight away what is the main idea of the text after you have read it? It is clear what opinion the author sticks with?

Basically, that is all, but if you are aiming at a more profound analysis, you cannot do without professional assistance. If somebody knows about coherence in academic writing, our online editors are among these people. Why dealing exactly with our company? These posts will explain:

The thing is that there are two ways to achieve coherence in an essay. The first one is to bear this concept in mind while writing and structuring the paper with the main principles that we already described. And the second way is to write a text as well as you can without thinking about specific rules and restrictions all the way through, and then to submit the document for editing and enjoy the newly acquired coherence together with other improvements in the text. It is up to you to choose your path, but our website always welcomes those students who select the latter.

We offer professional editing at fair prices (find out how we calculate the rates) that solves these problems:

Primarily, lack of coherence in academic texts. Since this article deals with this particular notion, we find it necessary to emphasize that our professional editors know numerous methods of structuring an essay efficiently. Feel free to make use of our online services, and always stay sure in the quality of your writing.
We eliminate grammar and spelling mistakes, making the text neat and trustworthy at the same time. Because as far as academic writing is concerned, mistakes spoil not only the readability of a text, but also its reliability. Do you still doubt the consequences that the ignorance of English punctuation can have?
Since academic writing is not only about writing, but also includes the visual part, we include the correction of formatting in the package of our services. Moreover, editors will amend the quotations throughout the text if this is necessary.

We hope this article helped you make a resolute step towards mastering coherence in English grammar. We remind you that there are two ways to do it: the hardest method includes learning how to write consistently, while the easiest one will be to entrust this task to specialists. If you choose the former, do not miss updates in the How to section of our blog because we give only practical advice that everyone can start using right now.

However, if you want to resort to professional help, we will guide you through the whole editing process since the moment you place your order till the deadline by which you will have got it back. Support managers are always ready to explain what is still unclear, so do not hesitate to ask them about what is bothering you. Who asks questions gets answers.

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Ways to Master Coherence in English Grammar