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CHAPTER 11
teaching of lexical substitutes comes up again, this time in connection with helping learners develop cohesive and unified prose, it may seem a little tired. Without belaboring the topic, this section sets out to offer a fewteach- ing techniques and tricks that have the goal of simplifying the matters of text cohesion as much as they can be simplified without a great deal of damage.
In 1981, Joseph M. Williams (Williams, 2002) created an intelligent and intelligible system for teaching text cohesion to anyone. His system was based on a few highly useful and accessible principles:
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It is more difficult to begin a sentence well than to end it well be- cause the writer needs to decide which idea is the newest and most important.
The newest and most important idea goes to the end of the sen- tence because it will be expanded on in the next sentence. However, the beginning of the sentence strongly sets up the reader's expectations about what follows, therefore the beginning of the sentence needs to be constructed carefully.
Figure 11.1 illustrates the organization of old-new information in a suc- cession of several sentences. The first sentence starts with known informa- tion—for instance, a noun phrase that refers to the paragraph topic as it is stated in the title (or mentioned in the preceding paragraph).
The techniques to accomplish the goals of constructing cohesive text are practical and straightforward (Williams,2002).
• Preliminary contexts and evaluative adverbs frame the sentence and are placed at the very beginnings of sentences (e.g., in many ways, generally speaking, it is important to note that, perhaps).
• The time and place of an action or event are also placed at the out- set (e.g., in the 20th century, during the experiment, at the time of the Ref- ormation, in Rome, in American social structure).
• After the preliminary elements, the sentence states what is already known and supplies the new information at the end.
FIG. 11.1. Sentence cohesion: old-new information connectivity.
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