Page 317 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

COHESION ANDCOHERENCE 303
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Three or more elements: comma after each element; a phrase con- junction (e.g., and/but/or) is required before the last element. In fact the conjunction and marks the last element in the parallel structure (e.g., soil, minerals, and water;production, trade, and distribu-
tion of goods; buy,sell, or trade commodities}.
xxxj , yyy , \and zzz OR [aaa , [bbbj , |ccc , or ddd
As mentioned in chapter 4, various punctuation marks have different "power," with the period being the most powerful sentence divider, fol- lowed by the semicolon and comma. In some contexts the semicolon and a conjunction + a comma can have the same power:
The United States is inhabited by5% of the world population, but/; it uses roughly 25% of the world's commercial energy.
The comma, possibly because of its relatively small dividing power, has a large number of uses. It can set off prepositional phrases, sentence transi- tions, elements of parallel structures (words or phrases alike), subordinate clauses, or short simple sentences when boosted by a conjunction. It is in part due to the comma's flexibility that L2writers find the punctuation rules dealing with commas confusing (and who can blame them!).
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Cohesion refers to connections between sentences and paragraphs, and co- herence can also refer to the organization of discourse with all elements pres- ent and fitting together logically. The following are techniques students can use to increase the cohesion and coherence of their writing:
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One effective way to teach cohesion is show students how to provide known information, usually with repeated lexical items or substi- tuted lexical items in the first part or a sentence with new informa- tion presented at the end of the sentence. The new information from one sentence is presented as old or known information in the subsequent sentence. There can be multiple cohesive chains of old and new information in paragraphs.
Enumerative nouns (e.g., aspect, characteristic, issue} are common in academic writing. Students can learn them and use them for lexical substitution to provide cohesion without undue redundancy.
• In coherent papers, examples are commonly used in support of points, but students need to focus on using academic types of exam- ples in academicwriting.
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