Coherence On and Off the Page: What Writers Can Know about Writing Coherently

This essay explores two related issues in the coherence of written texts: one concerning the nature of coherence and one concerning how writers are able to think about it. Most current accounts treat coherence as a feature of the design of texts, chiefly of large-scale matters of "organization" that readers then register (or not). We argue that coherence is more properly thought of not as a feature of texts but as a quality of certain reading experiences, supporting that case with a variety of evidence drawn from research into both reading and writing. We also show, however, why writers have little use for a definition of coherence that refers primarily to qualitative, ad hoc features of particular reading experiences rather than to fixed elements of a text's design. So what writers need is an understanding of coherence that avoids the false security of traditional accountsÑorganize your ideas and readers will see their coherenceÑbut that allows them to focus on the texts they are producing. For them, the coherence of a text is best thought of as a measure of the number of ways in which a text supports readers in generating a coherent understanding of it. In closing, we point to a few of the ways in which writers support a reader's achievement of coherence.