Ch 7 excerpts

   

Ch 7

Cohesion is continuity

First, the philosophy of transition and connection; or the art by which one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another…’ Thomas de Quincy

Now comes the task of moving the reader from old information to new information, first in an individual sentence and then in the sentences that make up a paragraph. Writers must know how to use this skill if they are to move ideas forward effectively.

Suppose your first sentence has several pieces of information in it, represented by A, B, and C. Then, when you begin the second sentence, you start talking about H! What happens to your reader? Suddenly, the reader has to slow down with a ‘How did this new information get here ? Okay, it’s here. But how does it connect to A, B, and C?’  You have derailed your reader, who has to hang on to H and re-read the first sentence to figure out how A, B, and C connect to H! Not a good strategy for cohesion and coherence. Should your third sentence push on to K, what then? Well, in addition to H (new information) the reader must also hold on to K (more new information) and then go back to A, B and C (old information) to make the connection. Effective writing? No. Is the idea moving forward? Nope. It’s being held back!

In this chapter, cohesion is always explained as sticking together effectively. In writing, it occurs best when pieces of information are held together in a strong fit, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that interlock and hold.  When words in a sentence fit together well, meaning is shared, and it grows; and when sentences in a paragraph fit together by carrying meaning from one to the next, that meaning grows and moves towards an objective.

In the next chapter, coherence runs all the way from systematic and logical connections to an integration of diverse elements that are held together. This occurs best when the pieces of a puzzle are seen as a whole, so that the reader first gets the single aspect that a sentence offers, and then gets to see the big picture that a group of sentences in a paragraph add up to.  It brings strength to diversity, even when differing values might exist.

A writer paints word pictures, and when this is done effectively, meaning can be quickly and satisfyingly grasped.

A sentence is cohesive when its word order requires minimal effort to help you grasp the intended meaning, as each word or phrase leads into the next, and meaning accrues. The subject is addressed, the topic specified, and actor and action are clearly identified, be they human or abstract.  

A paragraph is cohesive and coherent when each sentence leads you forward in narrative or logical sequence, like steps in a story or stops on a train route headed towards a destination, each with an add-on to the mission of meaning and purpose. Flow implies a continuity of thought and is sequential and relational – from word to word in a sentence, from sentence to sentence in a paragraph. The information processed in the first sentence, information that is ‘old’ and familiar, connects with the information presented in the next sentence, which is ‘new’ and possibly unfamiliar. It is meant to be a ‘building’ experience, gathering meaning, strength and shape as it moves forward. For structural and effective continuity, old information is best used at the beginning of a sentence - in the topic position; new information is best used at the end of a sentence, in the stress position.

To do this effectively is to bring the reader into your thought process as it emerges and develops in your writing! Writers have always held that a piece of writing is ready when the writer feels that it speaks clearly to the writer. But this disregards the critical communications question – does it speak clearly to the reader? Readers need the material at the beginning of a sentence to provide a connection backward to the previous sentence. When this is done, the reader can see the ongoing line of thought moving through the writing.

We have become used to the notion that writing is what it is, and we can only try to make the best of it. Some of it brings enjoyable reading, as with fiction and narrative work, while other non-fiction material may be specialized, thought provoking, and require a professional knowledge of the terms of discourse. If that is how it should be, then written communication has been allowed to become a very selective business, and unless you have specialized knowledge, you will always be in the dark over something or other. While the internet has helped greatly with information access, it is not always accurate and sometimes requires substantial comparative analysis. But in the business of good communication, anyone should be able to pick up something and read it and understand it reasonably well, then go on to check reference works for specialized terms.  If we get the basics right. The professional then becomes a source of affirmation, and can confirm, deny, describe, prescribe, or interpret what the reader has encountered, as needed.

As things stand, the consumer often pays for information that is limited. We have allowed it to become so and have not done ourselves any good in the process. Outside of narrative storytelling, reading now requires more energy and time. And we have come to believe that when content is not easily understood, it is too specialized and the reader does not understand it because of the inability of the untrained mind to deal with specialized knowledge. That seems to make sense, given the specialized training areas of medicine, law, chemical engineering, et al. But it is also nothing more than preferentialism, inadvertent or intentional, where specialized academic and professional groups claim specific meaning and hold close to themselves the power that comes with such knowledge. We don’t need that. We need professionals to make their work understandable to the average person. If it’s specialized, then the specialist ought to be sufficiently knowledgeable to break it down and explain it in clear terms. I have not seen too many who can do that effectively.  

Why not? Or maybe they were never taught that the true understanding of an item of information includes the ability to explain it to anyone, anytime. Otherwise, it becomes like quoting scripture: God said so. Here’s the verse. Do something with it. You don’t have to understand it. Just trust me. Umm….there is only now beginning to emerge, in primary care medicine, for example, that subtle and insidious truth that has existed all these years, i.e. that general practitioners generalize; like cool guesswork. Sheesh. Licensed Rx dealers. Hence my realization long ago that hey this ‘standard Rx dose’ is way too much for a little guy……

Every time a sentence seems to be difficult, the reader, not the writer, gets the blame. Why? Its really the writer’s responsibility. The sentence is not clear. Why? The information is there, but it’s all over the place or in a highly technical paste job. Why does this happen? Because the information exists in its original form in the mind of the writer, who understands what is meant and what is intended (he had the specialized Ph.D. training or whatever) and either believes that such thinking expressed in words is clear for all to understand or that it can only be expressed in technical terms and there is no other way of explaining it. This we have allowed. Now it needs to be dealt with so we can hold professionals accountable to those whom they profess to serve. Hence, the dilemma of all the examples we have seen thus far.

7.2 Let’s work our way through a few examples, starting with single sentences and then going on to complex ones.

1.Our school leaders lofty task is to change our school system to teach children to follow their passions and inspirations, and take risks within and outside our educational system, while reassuring them that the dots will connect at the end.

Subject? School leaders, yes? No. Subject is about policy change in education. Theme? Children’s education and career goals. OK.  Action = change, follow, teach, take risks, reassure.

Actors? Not clear. School leaders, teachers, education policy makers – all three or which? And no parental role? apparently not; the writer wants the school system to do it all! Ok. And the final conclusion? The dots must connect to give the reader a clear and strong conclusion? Nope. What is the big picture that the connected dots should show at the end? Don’t know. Ok.

 

First, let’s take ‘school leaders’ as is. The challenge - how exactly are these school leaders going to change the educational system? That’s more like a Ministry level task, so that systemic and systematic change for all may be addressed from the source itself. Get past that and you encounter ‘teach children’ which clearly refers to the task of the teacher. And if we are talking ‘teachers’, then we are not talking school ‘leaders’. That job belongs to a Principal. That’s administrative leadership. If we take ‘passions’ and ‘inspirations’ at face level, we still have to struggle with it because ‘risk taking’, in system and out of the system, and what that might mean, is not explained at all. The writer has something in mind, but the notion is vague. And when you try connecting the dots they don’t connect. Hence my efforts. If you don’t do the first one right, you won’t ever get to the second.

So - to review what appears to be struggling in this ‘egg’, pre-birth – we need school leaders who will help our children identify and pursue what matters most to them (Q: which ‘them’ is this? school leaders or children? And so it goes….); help them make choices and take risks as they might need to, in order to make progress; (what is an appropriate risk?) and give them support and inspire confidence in them, reassuring them that pursuing their goals will get them to where they want to go. (note the number of pronouns we need to work through that easily obscure clarity…..)

What went wrong? The key words that describe actor and action were never given much thought, so there is no cohesion in the sentence but a mix of different notions that do not stick together. To build cohesion and coherence, we shall have to change some of the terms and then realign them:

1. School leaders need to change school systems. Change = ?

(2. The Ministry of Education must spell out policy for this ‘change’ clearly.)

3. Then both school leaders and teachers can do the following:

a. teach students (how?) to follow their passions and inspirations

b. teach students(how?) to take risks, both in and out of school

c. provide assurance(how?) that it will all work in the end  

Once you lay out the formative strands of thought, it becomes very clear that instead of starting from the top down, as the writer does, it would be far more effective to start from the bottom up, where the writer’s goal is. And we should 1. avoid pronoun confusion and 2. align the terms of reference:

The original again:

1.Our school leaders lofty task is to have our schools teach our children to follow their passions and inspirations, and even take risks within and outside our educational system, while reassuring them that the dots will connect at the end.  (a great deal here, happily squeezed into a single sentence!)

 And revised:

1a.We want our children to have positive career guidance in school. Such guidance should help students identify their passions and inspirations and encourage them to calculate risks both in and out of school, while being monitored by teachers and parents. The children will need to see that their efforts can create worthwhile end results.  To facilitate this, the Ministry of Education will have to reformulate its policy on Guidance Counseling in schools, so that these aspects will become a dependable reality for our students.

One sentence has become four. But the intent of the writer is now clear. There was a lot of desperate disparate thinking going on in that one sentence, all bunched up into a tight knot. It needed unraveling. This is why the ‘Think Hard’ prescription is important. Too much of our style has been ‘talk now, think later.’ Very often played out as ‘write now, explain later.’ Doesn’t help. Thinking requires time.  And if time is not used well, the end result will never be worthwhile i.e. sustainable! Expressing thoughts on paper takes even more time. We need to structure our lives to do this effectively. If we don’t, we will be disregarded and will not make much of a difference, even though we may be working hard! And work productivity and life quality will suffer…

3. It may be appropriate then, at this critical juncture of Singapore’s history, during which the Government’s Budget has implicitly embodied a model of co-responsibility for what was previously a self-funded model of retirement savings, to explicitly create an integrated unified platform for all future schemes to supplement the CPF. 

Remember this one? Suppose we take the entire section that has been set off by commas, as underlined above, and move it up front.  The writer was trying to squeeze a lot into a single sentence. Why? No clear reason. Was it an effective way to write? No. It made the sentence convoluted. Ineffective use of the comma – to squeeze in additional information clauses and separate them with a comma! All we’ve done is to take the context out – when it should go before to set the stage, which would give us:

3a. At this critical juncture of Singapore’s history, the Government has drawn up a Budget that embodies a model of co-responsibility. They have moved away from the previous self-funded retirement model. It may be appropriate then to explicitly create an integrated, unified platform for all future schemes that supplement the CPF.

Note the difference? This ‘let’s pack it all into a single sentence, doesn’t matter how long it is, we can just separate the various parts with commas’ – is a very ineffective style of communicating. It requires translation! All we did was to separate the contextual information first and place it up front. Then the reader has a sense of what’s happening. And then the recommendation follows. And the logic is clear, the argument smoother, the effect stronger. This is the point of writing for the reader!  To fine tune this, we could edit it for word use. (not word usage!) Why? Because some of the words are just thrown in to make it look and sound impressive, and they don’t do anything for the meaning that needs to be shared!

Take an example – what does ‘appropriate’ ever mean? Well, probably what you want it to mean! It’s supposedly ‘consensus’ language, moving away from the traditional form of right vs wrong (don’t tell me your moral sense of it, that’s your religion…etc) into appropriate and inappropriate. But what is it based on? When you push it, appropriate is forced to reveal that it’s just a cover, and behind it the real norms are hiding. Why are they hiding? Because the speaker does not want the listener to figure out where he’s at and where he’s coming from because there might be vulnerability there. The politics of language…

So, on to examples:  – critical juncture? But junctures are always critical – they are markers, transition points; Why ‘implicitly embody – explicitly create’? a Budget does not ‘embody’ anything! It just uses formulas! And ‘explicitly create’? A Government is never explicit nor implicit in its execution of policy – it cannot afford to be. It makes policy decisions and carries them out. It executes! (or fails to!)  This is playing at poetry?

Word use is very ‘inappropriate’ here! And this, is the work of an academic? There is a lot of thinking going on, sure. But it is not expressed clearly. We are in some difficulty.  And so is the political claim to a world class education system!

Once again:

It may be appropriate then at this critical juncture of Singapore’s history during which the Government’s Budget has implicitly embraced a model of co-responsibility for what was previously a self-funded model of retirement savings to explicitly create an integrated unified platform for all future schemes to supplement the CPF.

And our final edit:

The Singapore government has changed its mind about the funding of retirement savings. It originally supported a self-funded model. It has now decided to adopt a model of co-responsibility. Given that the country is at a critical juncture, this is a good move. The government should therefore consider integrating all schemes that supplement the CPF into a single matrix.