Identifying Paragraph With Adequate and Inadequate Cohesion

How to write paragraph with adequate and inadequate cohesion

Cohesion in paragraph means the connectivity in text from one sentence to another. To make paragraph to be cohesive, there must be connectors (and, so, when, in addition, before), definite articles (the), personal pronouns (he, she, they), and demonstrative pronouns(this, that, those, these) and etc.among the sentences.For example:

"My favouritecolour is blue.  I like it because it is calming and it relaxes me.  I often go outside in the summer and lie on the grass and look into the clear sky when I am stressed.  For this reason, I'd have to say my favouritecolour is blue."

Cohesion

Based on Oxford dictionary, cohesion means the action or fact of forming a united whole. Cohesion in writing paragraph is connecting all of the sentences with or without coherence. There two types of cohesion: 1) Grammatical cohesion and 2) lexical cohesion.

1)     Grammatical cohesion

There are four categories:

a.       Reference (he, him, his, I, me, my, that, this, etc.)

b.      Substitution (one, ones, same, do, so, not.)

c.       Ellipsis is an elimination of grammatical part in order to achieve efficiency.

d.      Conjunction is a cohesive item which connects the relation between.

2)     Lexical cohesion

a.       Repetition(do, does, did, doing).
2. Synonymy (leave – depart).
3. Antonymy(leave – arrive).
4. Hyponymy (flower – rose).
5. Pararellism(faster better).

The difference between cohesion and coherence

Simply, cohesion is about the connectivity in text, whereas coherence is about how the paragraph to be understandable. In other words, cohesive paragraph not always coherent and coherent paragraph not always cohesive too. For example:

Cohesion and coherence

"My favouritecolour is blue.  I like it because it is calming and it relaxes me.  I often go outside in the summer and lie on the grass and look into the clear sky when I am stressed.  For this reason, I'd have to say my favouritecolour is blue."

The example above shows that all of the sentence are connected cohesively and understandable.

Cohesion, but not coherence

"My favouritecolour is blue.  Blue sports cars go very fast.  Driving in this way is dangerous and can cause many car crashes.  I had a car accident once and broke my leg.  I was very sad because I had to miss a holiday in Europe because of the injury."

The paragraph above shows that all of the sentences are connected cohesively, but it doesn’t make any sense and difficult to understand.

Identifying cohesion in paragraph

Me

I would like to describe myself. My name is M Fatkhu Arifin, all of the people around me call me ipin like one of cartoon character on TV. I was born on January 19^th 1995 at the twilight time. I come from Bandar Sribhawono, East Lampung, but I stay in Metro City to continuing my study at Muhammadiyah University of Metro. I have thin and short body. My weight is 49kg and my height is around 155cm. I have a middle square face and have a thin beard. Most of my friends said that my nose is pointed and I believe them. I have a black eyes with bold eyebrows and a bit wide mouth. Something about me is “the who you think I am”, but if I may guess, I am the arrogant person. I often defeated by my own pride. Nobody said directly to me, but their expression shows that I am a boring person. The best thing about me is spent my high school career in developing student activities in my school. Some people said that I have an old head on young shoulders just because I gave many contribution on student community at that time. I have variative hobby depend on my mood. I like listening music, sport, journey, even being alone is also part of my hobby and it is the most I do in my spare time. That is why I don’t have many close friend. I like being alone because there a lot of problems that I have to think about, not for myself, but for public. And I can think well only if I am alone, although sometimes I need other to gives some considerations. At last, that’s all a brief description about me, the thing is who I am depend on the people’s valuation.

Sentences	Explainations
I would like to describe myself. My name is M Fatkhu Arifin, all of the people around me call me ipin like one of cartoon character on TV.	It is grammatical cohesion, include of reference. My refers to I.
I have thin and short body. My weight is 49kg and my height is around 155cm.	It is lexical cohesion, include of hyponymy. Thin-weight, short-height.
Something about me is “the who you think I am”, but if I may guess, I am the arrogant person. I often defeated by my own pride.	It is also lexical cohesion, include of synonymy (arrogant-pride)
I like listening music, sport, journey, even being alone is also part of my hobby and it is the most I do in my spare time. That is why I don’t have many close friend.	It is grammatical cohesion, include of reference. That refers to being alone.