Helping students understand coherence in terms of the lexical ties and semantic relations possible between clauses and sentences formalizes an area of writing instruction that has been somewhat vague before and makes the process of creating a coherent paragraph less mysterious. Many students do not have the intuitive knowledge base for absorbing…

Warns against the overuse of cohesive conjunctions in writing and recommends that teachers instruct students on contextual use of conjunctions rather than on their random use. (CRH)

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

To test the hypothesis that paragraphs composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics (the grammatical subject and its adjuncts) would be easier to read than a paragraph whose sentence topics were only remotely related, two experiments on the readability of paragraphs were conducted. The first experiment involved subjective…