Laura asked an important questions concerning the Unit 1 assignment, especially these two points:
I understand I am trying diversify my sentence use and making my sentence type use appropriate for what I am saying, but what do you specifically mean by "cohesion" and "coherence"? And how do I know when they are broken? I think our discussion about my sentence regarding "by the scarecrow competition" might be a moment of that, but I'm not sure. Indeed. Let us take a closer look at that sentence together with the ones that immediately follow it: Professor Boatwright had wandered into the thickest part of the crowd by the scarecrow competition. From across a swath festival goers and straw men, a head of green hair turned toward another; a hooded figure stood with her. Lorelei’s lips moved. The young woman moved to go, but the figure grabbed at her. Boatwright pushed through the crowd towards them. Before we proceed, some definitions are in order, beginning with "cohesion," which Holcomb and Killingsworth write in their book, Performing Prose. They write on page 40 The passage already has some cohesion, but it is dispersed a bit. Boatwright is there at the beginning of the sentence, but not at the end, and perhaps he ought to be emphasized at the end of the sentence so that the reader gets what he notices there at the beginning of the next sentence. I will start with revising this first simple sentence with a bit of an afterthought into a compound/complex sentence with a couple of afterthoughts: A small multitude of bodies thronged together to witness the scarecrow competition, and after having wandered into the thickest part of the crowd, Professor Boatwright stood still, frozen, with squinted eyes. From across a swath festival goers and straw men, a head of green hair turned toward another; a hooded figure stood with her. Lorelei’s lips moved. The young woman moved to go, but the figure grabbed at her. Boatwright pushed through the crowd towards them. So, what I've done here is put Boatwright at the end of the sentence, emphasizing just a part of him (this is called synechdoche), which then adds cohesion to the prose because the reader can more readily connect the "eyes" to the event happening "across a swath of festival goes." Issues of coherence begin to emerge as you bring cohesion to your sentences. Here is an excellent way to distinguish coherence from cohesion that Joseph Williams provides in Lesson five of his wonderful little book, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (some of these lessons are available in the dropbox folder: recommended readings--look for "Williams"). He writes: Coherence is how all the sentences work together in a wonderful exchange between emphasis and de-emphasis. If every moment is emphasized, nothing is. So, Laura will more than likely discover that with revising this sentence, she must also enact new and unexpected, but necessary, changes to the rest of her sentences to articulate a greater experience of coherence.
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