Professional Writing Style: 12 Tutorials–Lesson 7 | Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center

Created by Dr. Russel Hirst, Professor Emeritus, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, rkh@utk.edu

Lesson 7: Create Coherence

Introduction to Coherence

You’re familiar with the term “punch line.” It’s the payoff at the end of a joke. What would happen to the joke if the punch line were to be buried somewhere in the middle? That’s right. The joke would lose its punch.

Unfortunately, the same sort of thing happens all the time in technical/professional writing. The most important ideas get tied up in the middle of sentences and paragraphs; they aren’t allowed that powerful “last word.”

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting that good professional writing deliberately delays understanding or creates ambiguity or suspense. Those things are anathema to most forms of communication in government, industry, and business. Busy executives and engineers and consumers and government officials and managers want the big picture, or the answer to their questions, ASAP.

Sure, delay and suspense and ambiguity are hallmarks of certain brands of fiction writing. If a novelist tells you up front that the butler did it, that is not usually good story architecture (unless there are other webs of suspense & etc. to be woven around that initial revelation). Good practical writing, by contrast, almost always reveals the big news up front; that’s why we have executive summaries, abstracts, subject lines, descriptive headings, and so on. But at the micro level, every sentence and paragraph you write has a pattern of “suspense” and subsequent emphasis–at the end of the sentence and at the end of the paragraph.

Organization is the First Step

Some writers, rather than using this pattern to advantage, will try to make significant phrases stand out by italicizing or capitalizing or boldfacing them. That can work occasionally, but it’s a stopgap measure. Overuse it, and your readers will quickly tire of it. It’s much more effective to position your most important ideas, the ideas you’re building up to in your sentences and paragraphs, at the end. That’s the power slot.

Take a look at your own prose to see whether you are getting sufficient punch. In general, your pattern from sentence to sentence should present old information first and new information last. As we’ll see shortly, this also allows you to make transitions more easily. Exercise 1 on the Practice sheet allows you to practice making sentences more emphatic.

Add Transitions

Probably the most obvious action you can take to improve a document’s coherence is to make sure you’ve used enough of those sentences, phrases, and words that show how pieces of text are related. We call these “transitions” because they take you from one conceptual place to another. Transitions should provide coherence on every level of the document. Between major and minor sections, transitions might require whole sentences or even paragraphs; between smaller blocks of text they may be no more than a word or phrase. Sometimes, these are simply pronouns harking back to antecedents (such as “he” pointing back to “Fred”), or repeated words or phrases that connect one sentence to another. For example, let’s add a sentence to one of our example sentences from Exercise 1:

While sampling sediments downstream from our site, investigators found heavy mercury concentrations. Such dense concentrations of contaminants are common within reservation boundaries, but to find them so far out from the reservation is quite alarming.

However, we can’t use that method alone, sentence after sentence, without running the risk of “free association”:

Sheep overgrazing is a major cause of soil erosion. Erosion of that kind can turn a beautiful, vegetated hill into a wasteland of gullies. Gullies, once they are deep, can’t easily be crossed by motor vehicles. Those motor vehicles, especially ATVs, are turning our once-peaceful national parks and forests into noisy vacation lands for the rich. The rich are really taking over our park lands in every way, not only invading it with all kind of motorized contraptions, but buying up land right next to and even inside of our traditional recreation areas. Recreation is a right of all Americans, and those healthy enough to get out into the wilds should get out there and enjoy it as often as possible.

Such a paragraph is fragmented chatter; the fact that each sentence is linked to the one before it does not, by itself, give the paragraph structure, “architecture.” That’s why you were taught, in Freshman Composition (and earlier) to create a topic sentence for each of your paragraphs, and then to provide a logical development for your assertion. That development can take many forms, and the topic sentence itself usually suggests a form for development. For example, here’s a topic sentence and a schematic for possible development:

Blue whales are bigger, smarter, and tougher than any terrestrial behemoth ever was.

BWs weigh up to 1,500 tons;

Heaviest dino weighed less than 100 tons.

BWs have Volkswagen-sized brains and enjoy complex inter-whale communication;

Biggest dino brain was only coconut sized, not capable of complex communication

BWs endure tremendous changes in temperature and pressure;

Dinos were wimps, wiped out by cold weather

The obvious pattern that suggested itself here was comparison and contrast. If you are like most writers in government, industry, and business, you don’t have a great deal of trouble perceiving patterns for development of your prose. What you may not be so good at is revealing those logical relationships to your readers, clearly and consistently. You are very close to your own material; you already understand it. Nothing you are writing about strikes you as new or unfamiliar; you already understand the relationships between the ideas in your prose. What you must bear constantly in mind is the fact that your readers will not instantly see all these logical relationships in your prose unless you signal them. If your readers already understood everything in your communication, they’d have no need to read it in the first place.

Self-test Your Coherence

Here’s a good way to test the “coherence factor” of your own prose. Read through a few pages of your writing and circle in pencil all the pronouns that have clear antecedents and all the words/phrases that have a clear repetition or link (some variation of the word or phrase). Draw an arrow from pronoun to antecedent and from words/phrases to their repetitions and links. Then take a pen and draw a box around all the explicit logical connectives such as “moreover,” “as a result,” “similarly,” “later,” and “nonetheless.” You should end up with a good peppering of boxes; I can’t tell you exactly how many. Those logical connectors are what your English teachers keep calling “transitions.”

You probably remember those lists of transitions from your undergraduate grammar/mechanics handbook. What you may have forgotten is the great range of logical functions that transitions can serve—or more likely, you have learned a style of professional writing that leaves out many transitions in favor of a “straightforward” style that doesn’t “insult the intelligence of the reader.”

But that’s generally a cop-out. A transition-poor style of writing is hard to read, because you’ve left the reader to do the work of figuring out relationships between things. Even if your paragraphs have some good internal structure, your reader still feels you have “data dumped.”

Which of these two paragraphs would you prefer to read?

The contractor is still operating in two shifts. Cleared debris is now being piled. No burning at all is being permitted in the county. The continued dry weather has produced extreme fire hazard conditions. No power equipment is permitted to operate when the relative humidity is below 20%.

Let’s provide transitions and also use active voice:

The contractor is still operating in two shifts, and workers are piling cleared debris. Even so, fire marshals are permitting no burning at all, since the continued dry weather has produced extreme fire hazard conditions. Not only are officials prohibiting any burning, but they don’t even allow power equipment to operate when the relative humidity is below 20%.

There’s an adage among good writers: “The harder it is to write, the easier it is to read—and vice-versa.” If you make your reader do mental work that you should have done, you won’t have a happy reader.

Here, for your review, are some common transitional words and phrases, grouped according to function.

Function	Transitions
Adding	and, also, again, further, furthermore, moreover, in addition, another reason, what’s more, equally important
Placing in Time	First (ly), second (ly), later, previously, afterwards, next, and then, formerly, finally, at length, immediately thereafter, as soon as
Placing in Space	here, nearby, behind, next to, further on, further back, opposite to, in the distance, above, close by
Contrasting	but, yet, still, even so, notwithstanding, nevertheless, on the other hand, despite the fact that, conversely, on the contrary, be that as it may, whereas
Illustrating/Specifying	for example, that is, for instance, in other words, as an illustration, a case in point, namely, the point is, of these, specifically, to demonstrate, for instance
Showing Similarity	in like manner, in the same way, similarly, likewise, also, too, accordingly
Revealing Cause & Effect	due to, since, so, consequently, therefore, thus, hence, then, as a result, we see that, because of this, whereupon
Conceding/Qualifying	though, even though, although, granted, granted that, while, it may be true that, at the same time, doubtless, in spite of, I admit, naturally, up to a point, sometimes
Concluding	in conclusion, to sum up, in other words, finally, in short, in brief, in the last analysis
Revealing Purpose	To this end, with this object, because, for this purpose

Note that these are just a few of the sense-making signposts good writers provide for readers. In fact, they are often just the front end of a transition; “notwithstanding” expands to “notwithstanding yesterday’s events,” and so on.

You should be able to think of other categories of transition. For example, what about the very activity I discussed at the beginning of this unit: “being emphatic”? Although emphasis is best achieved structurally, as I’ve explained, one may also use transitional words and phrases that specifically convey emphasis:

Emphasizing
indeed, in fact, as a matter of fact, even, obviously, especially, most importantly, above all, in particular, remarkably

Create Coherent Paragraphs

There are three basic transitional moves to create coherent paragraphs:

Link the “new info” at the beginning of a sentence to the “old info” at the end of the preceding sentence.
Use pronouns to link to antecedents (nouns that came earlier).
Use explicit transition words generously (“although,” “consequently,” etc.).

A final warning: any principle can be abused. I pointed out earlier how a silly “free association” results if your paragraphs lack intelligent architecture. You can’t compensate for that lack of architecture with any of the techniques above. See what you can make of this paragraph, for example:

For chronic bioassays, the endpoint usually considered is survival. Notwithstanding this standard, reproductive success is measured by the number of young produced during exposure. On the other hand, this must involve the quantification of a biological response with a pollutant concentration for a designated exposure period. For this reason, the regulation and management of pollutants in aquatic ecosystems are based upon toxicological information. However, it is still important to note that management decisions can only be made after some knowledge of the effects of toxicants over long periods of exposure has been achieved.

A bit confusing? It sounds like it should make sense, because there are so many logical connectors. Unfortunately, the paragraph didn’t have a logical structure to begin with. A paragraph without structure can’t be “saved” by pouring in transitional words and phrases. Connectives can signal only logical structures that already exist or are “waiting to be made” within a logical pattern. They can’t create sense that isn’t fundamentally there already.

However, many writers in business, industry, and government err on the lean side of logical connectivity. It’s better to err on the side of abundance. Don’t assume that readers see all the connections you do. Make those connections for your readers. Save their mental energy. They will praise you.

Practice, Lesson 7: Create Coherence

Enter your revision in the box below each exercise. Click the “>” below each box to see Dr. Hirst’s revision.

Exercise 1: Be Emphatic and Coherent

Move the most important element to the end of the sentence. Since you can’t really know what’s most important without context, I have boldfaced the elements I’ve decided to regard as most important. As you maneuver the boldfaced phrase to the end of the sentence, keep all your stylistic tools ready at hand. For example, toggle from passive to active voice, denominalize, and prune words.

1. Gypsy Moth trappers should wear boots and heavy clothing as protection against barbed wire and rattlesnakes and other hazards while setting up traps in fields and forests and other rough terrain.