Whats the difference between coherence and cohesion!?

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Dmitri Dalla-Riva

22/4/2015

As an English Language tutor, I get asked this question quite frequently. Its more of a conundrum than one would
initially think. However, once dissected into an understandable answer, it should therefore make sense. Recall that
both coherence and cohesion come under the subsystem of discourse.
COHERENCE SEMANTIC PROPERTY
Coherence is a quality of a piece of text that makes it meaningful in the minds of the readers. When the text begins
to make sense on the whole, it is said to be coherent. If the readers can follow and understand a text easily, it
obviously has coherence. Rather than the text appearing linked together perfectly, it is the overall impression of the
text that appears to be smooth and clear.
Coherence can be achieved through the use of titles, subtitles, paragraphing, formatting, logical ordering,
orthography (spelling, punctuation, capitalisation) and so forth. For example, this article itself is coherent as it has
proper paragraphs that are logically ordered from one another, it has proper subtitles to divide the text into
coherence and cohesion, and it makes use of bolding and capitalisation to signal important parts.
Inference is very important in achieving coherence, because sometimes in a text the reader may need to have prior
knowledge about a subject. So while a text may appear coherent to one person, it may appear incoherent to another
person (possibly because of lack of prior knowledge, or cant infer it). However, even in this case, the text may be
cohesive, because the sentences join well together, create meaning and flow on from each other. So you could have
an incoherent text, but a cohesive text (just to make things more confusing!)
COHESION FLOW OF A TEXT
Cohesion can be thought of as glue sticking different parts of furniture so that it takes the shape the writer wants it to
give.

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Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it
meaning. In short, the links that stick different sentences and make the text meaningful can be thought of as
cohesion in the text. Establishing connections between sentences, sections, and even paragraphs using synonyms,
adverbials, conjunctions etc. is what brings cohesion in a text.
For example, have you ever wondered WHY your teacher keeps telling us to use adverbials within your essay body
paragraphs (e.g. furthermore, in addition, similarly, likewise etc). These all add flow to the text.
Consider this cohesive example:
John went to the shops and he bought an ice-cream then ate it.
Now lets remove the cohesion (flow) in this text and see what happens.
John went to the shops. John bought an ice-cream. John ate the ice-cream.
A little repetitive and monotonous, right? As can be seen in the cohesive example above, three cohesive devices
have been used:
1. Ellipsis (he has been omitted in then [he] ate it)
2. Conjunctions (and to join the sentences together)
3. Substitution (John becomes he, and the ice-cream becomes it)
Well, there you have it! This should now easily allow you to distinguish between coherence and cohesion!
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