218 – Cohesion and texture
All these words refer backwards in your text to participants you have announced earlier. What you must take pains to
ensure is that the particular word, phrase or statement to which
they refer is crystal clear. Confusion sets in if your reader cannot
work out quickly and precisely what an ‘it’, a ‘this’ or an ‘each’
refers to. If there is doubt, it is better to repeat the word or phrase
itself.
Similarly, there are words and phrases which refer forwards
in your text (e.g. below, as we shall see, thus, the following, to be
discussed). In addition, the colon (:) is a punctuation mark that refers
forwards.
1.3
Coordinating structures
When you are building up stretches of text, cast your eye back to
see whether you have used your grammatical structures to achieve
cohesion. Constructing a piece of writing has much in common with
constructing anything else. The parts to be joined together – in this
case grammatical structures – have to be sufficiently alike in shape at
the place where they meet to fit securely. A nut and a bolt are quite
different objects; but their threads need to match.
Two very common structures can be troublesome. With number, it is quite easy to slip inadvertently from singular to plural; and
with tense, present and past are easily pushed into an unhappy union.
(We noticed a slip of tense in the passage by Sabine on Edmund Burke’s
conception of natural rights, on p. 156 above.) If you do find yourself
switching number or tense about too often, this lack of cohesion might
have quite deep-seated causes. These causes are examined in chapter
7, section 2.3, and chapter 8, section 3.4.
Coordination is typically performed by ‘and’, ‘in addition’,
‘or’, ‘but’ and their equivalents, as well as by other devices. When you
bring two ideas together in this way, check that the two structures on
either side of the join are parallel. The first sentence of this paragraph
is a case in point. Two sets of terms are coordinated by ‘as well as’.
Both these sets of terms are dominated by the word ‘performed’. In
order to secure the join, the ‘by’ in the first set is repeated in the
second. Now, it is perfectly acceptable in short simple coordinations
to omit the second of these binding elements:
All these words refer backwards in your text to participants you have announced earlier. What you must take pains to
ensure is that the particular word, phrase or statement to which
they refer is crystal clear. Confusion sets in if your reader cannot
work out quickly and precisely what an ‘it’, a ‘this’ or an ‘each’
refers to. If there is doubt, it is better to repeat the word or phrase
itself.
Similarly, there are words and phrases which refer forwards
in your text (e.g. below, as we shall see, thus, the following, to be
discussed). In addition, the colon (:) is a punctuation mark that refers
forwards.
1.3
Coordinating structures
When you are building up stretches of text, cast your eye back to
see whether you have used your grammatical structures to achieve
cohesion. Constructing a piece of writing has much in common with
constructing anything else. The parts to be joined together – in this
case grammatical structures – have to be sufficiently alike in shape at
the place where they meet to fit securely. A nut and a bolt are quite
different objects; but their threads need to match.
Two very common structures can be troublesome. With number, it is quite easy to slip inadvertently from singular to plural; and
with tense, present and past are easily pushed into an unhappy union.
(We noticed a slip of tense in the passage by Sabine on Edmund Burke’s
conception of natural rights, on p. 156 above.) If you do find yourself
switching number or tense about too often, this lack of cohesion might
have quite deep-seated causes. These causes are examined in chapter
7, section 2.3, and chapter 8, section 3.4.
Coordination is typically performed by ‘and’, ‘in addition’,
‘or’, ‘but’ and their equivalents, as well as by other devices. When you
bring two ideas together in this way, check that the two structures on
either side of the join are parallel. The first sentence of this paragraph
is a case in point. Two sets of terms are coordinated by ‘as well as’.
Both these sets of terms are dominated by the word ‘performed’. In
order to secure the join, the ‘by’ in the first set is repeated in the
second. Now, it is perfectly acceptable in short simple coordinations
to omit the second of these binding elements: