Writing Criteria Coherence and Cohesion in Writing

students’ past experiences in their writing activity also supports bottom- up and top-down reading process.

b. Writing Criteria

In order to produce a good writing, a writer has to notice the criteria of writing itself. There are seven criteria of writing proposed by John Shiffert 2005 as cited in http:adminservices.clayton.edu. The first one is the knowledge of subject which consists of appropriateness, accuracy, extens iveness, and perspective. The second one is awareness of reader which consists of development, purpose, readers’ needs and attitudes, responsible argumentation, and also diction. The third one is organization which consists of introductory paragraph, where the thesis statement is stated, body paragraph, and concluding paragraph. The body paragraph provides the topic sentence, unity, coherence, and development. The fourth criterion of writing is format. It consists of manuscript form, spelling, abbreviations, numbers and symbols, capitalization, and document format as well. The fifth is punctuation. The sixth is sentence structures which consist of sentence patterns, grammar and usage, and sentence completeness. The last one is style which consists of appropriate tone, conciseness, and precision. Legget 1965: 192 proposes briefly that a good paragraph should have several elements such as unity, coherence, and adequate development. A paragraph has unity if all sentences contribute directly to a single purpose. In order to gain a coherent paragraph, it should contain not only the inter-related sentences in a subject matter but also sentences which are specifically tied PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI together by logic and grammatical structure. A coherent paragraph can be supported by the presence of adequate cohesive devices among the sentences.

c. Coherence and Cohesion in Writing

Wales in Asher 1994: 603 argues that coherence is a semantic cohesion whereas cohesion is a textual coherence. Coherence can be identified from the idea or content of the text which is put logically in sentences. Indeed, cohesive devices can answer how sentences of a text hang together but it cannot explain the whole story of the text continuously. Crystal 1987: 119 adds that it is possible to write a sentence sequence that is highly cohesive but nonetheless incoherent. Cohesion concerns with the ways in which the first components, for example the words and the sentences, are mutually connected within a sequence by formal means such as grammatical patterns, lexical items, and also phonological rules in oral texts Togeby in Asher, 1994: 4580. Hence, while coherence has to do with the deep structure of a text, cohesion has to do with the surface structure. Cohesive devices are useful in explaining how the words or sentences hang together. To clarify this notion, the following example of a coherent and cohesive text is beneficial. A week has seven days. Everyday I feed my cat. The cat is eating now. It seems that she loves the meals today. From the example above, it can be identified that it is coherent from the idea in which the sentence is actually talking about a cat that is fed daily. This sentence can also be said as a cohesive text by identifying the cohesive devices used in the PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI sentence. The word everyday presupposes the seven days and the word she to presuppose the cat.

1. Coherence