Cohesive devices guide readers, helping them follow your train of thought by connecting key words and phrases throughout a passage. Among such devices are pronoun reference, word repetition, synonyms, sentence structure repetition, and collocation.

Pronouns connect phrases or sentences.

One common cohesive device is pronoun reference. As noun substitutes, pronouns refer to nouns that either precede or follow them and thus serve to connect phrases or sentences. The nouns that come before pronouns are called antecedents.

In New York from dawn to dusk to dawn, day after day, you can hear the steady rumble of tires against the concrete span of the George Washington Bridge.The bridge is never completely still. It trembles with traffic. It moves in the wind. Its great veins of steel swell when hot and contract when cold; its span often is ten feet closer to the Hudson River in summer than in winter.

— GAY TALESE, “New York”

This example has only one pronoun-antecedent chain, and the antecedent comes first, so all the pronouns refer back to it. When there are multiple pronoun-antecedent chains with references forward as well as back, writers have to make sure that readers will not mistake one pronoun’s antecedent for another’s.

Word repetition aids cohesion.

To avoid confusion, writers often use word repetition. The device of repeating words and phrases is especially helpful if a pronoun might confuse readers:

531

Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors. The poor can see the affluent easily enough — on television, for example, or on the covers of magazines. But the affluent rarely see the poor or, if they do catch sight of them in some public space, rarely know what they’re seeing, since — thanks to consignment stores and, yes, Wal-Mart —the poor are usually able to disguise themselves as members of the more comfortable classes.

— BARBARA EHRENREICH, Nickel and Dimed

In the next example, several overlapping chains of word repetition prevent confusion and help the reader follow the ideas:

Natural selection is the central concept of Darwinian theory — the fittest survive and spread their favored traits through populations. Natural selection is defined by Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest,” but what does this famous bit of jargon really mean? Who are the fittest? And how is “fitness” defined? We often read that fitness involves no more than “differential reproductive success” — the production of more surviving offspring than other competing members of the population. Whoa! cries Bethell, as many others have before him. This formulation defines fitness in terms of survival only. The crucial phrase of natural selection means no more than “the survival of those who survive” — a vacuous tautology. (A tautology is a phrase — like “my father is a man” — containing no information in the predicate [“a man”] not inherent in the subject [“my father”]. Tautologies are fine as definitions, but not as testable scientific statements — there can be nothing to test in a statement true by definition.)

— STEPHEN JAY GOULD, Ever Since Darwin

Synonyms connect ideas.

In addition to word repetition, you can use synonyms, words with identical or very similar meanings, to connect important ideas. In the following example, the author develops a careful chain of synonyms and word repetitions:

Over time, small bits of knowledge about a region accumulate among local residents in the form of stories. These are remembered in the community; even what is unusual does not become lost and therefore irrelevant. These narratives comprise for a native an intricate, long-term view of a particular landscape.. . . Outside the region this complex but easily shared “reality” is hard to get across without reducing it to generalities, to misleading or imprecise abstraction.

— BARRY LOPEZ, Arctic Dreams

The result is a coherent paragraph that constantly reinforces the author’s point.

Repetition of sentence structure emphasizes connections.

Writers occasionally use sentence structure repetition to emphasize the connections among their ideas, as in this example:

532

But the life forms are as much part of the structure of the Earth as any inanimate portion is. It is all an inseparable part of a whole. If any animal is isolated totally from other forms of life, then death by starvation will surely follow. If isolated from water, death by dehydration will follow even faster. If isolated from air, whether free or dissolved in water, death by asphyxiation will follow still faster. If isolated from the Sun, animals will survive for a time, but plants would die, and if all plants died, all animals would starve.

— ISAAC ASIMOV, “The Case against Man”

Collocation creates networks of meaning.

Collocation— the positioning of words together in expected ways around a particular topic — occurs quite naturally to writers and usually forms recognizable networks of meaning for readers. For example, in a paragraph on a high school graduation, a reader might expect to encounter such words as valedictorian, diploma, commencement, honors, cap and gown, and senior class. The paragraph that follows uses five collocation chains:

The seventeenth-century housewife not only had to make do without thermometers, she also had to make do without clocks, which were scarce and dear throughout the sixteen hundreds. She calculated cooking times by the progression of the sun; her cooking must have been more precise on clear days than on cloudy ones. Marks were sometimes painted on the floor, providing her with a rough sundial, but she still had to make allowance for the obstinacy of the sun in refusing to cast its light at the same angle as the seasons changed; but she was used to allowing for the vagaries of sun and weather. She also had a problem starting her fire in the morning; there were no matches. If she had allowed the hot coals smoldering under the ashes to go out, she had to borrow some from a neighbor, carrying them home with care, perhaps in a bed-warming pan.

— WAVERLY ROOT AND RICHARD DE ROUCHEMENT, Eating in America