Cohesion and Coherence

Cohesion and coherence, or connecting ideas between sentences and paragraphs, are the most important elements of any piece of writing, be it personal, business, or academic. Read the two versions of a report a student hands in to her professor about a conference she went to.  Which one do you think is better and why?  [...]

Metalanguage: Talking to the Reader

I have been told by many of my students over the years that they have problems making their writing flow.  This means that they want the ideas that they put in the text run together smoothly–having a sense of cohesion and coherence (see the link at the end of this post for more explanation of [...]

Topics for Writing Practice

These topics are not mine (they are from http://kazuo.fc2web.com/English/TOEFL-essay.htm), nor are they taken from real TOEFL topics, but they are just perfect as a springboard for your writing practice.  If you want to write something but don’t really know what to write about, choose one of the topics below and sit down and write for [...]

Main and Supporting Ideas: Part 2

In Part 1, we have looked at main ideas and supporting ideas from the reader’s perspective.  Now we will become the writers ourselves and practice distinguishing main and supporting ideas. Exercise 1 In each group of words, there are a topic and ideas about that topic.  Find the topics and think about why they are [...]

Main and Supporting Ideas: Part 1

In most extended texts, especially in academic writing, a paragraph, essay, article, or book cannot be complete without a main idea.  It is what the paragraph, essay, etc., is all about, and it is exemplified, elaborated, and/or expanded by supporting ideas as we move along in the text.  When someone reads your text, he/she looks [...]

The Tip-of-the-Iceberg Phenomenon

This is a common term that you might hear your writing teachers use. The tip of the iceberg is that part that sticks up above the water and that is visible, for example, to Jack and Rose on the Titanic. But there’s much more to an iceberg, as you can see from the picture. The [...]

Organization: Separating Ideas into Paragraphs

A good writer divides his/her text into chunks of different ideas.  The more connected ideas stay in one or adjacent paragraphs (but the length of the paragraph is also an important issue–readers can’t tolerate super long paragraphs even if the author is talking about the same idea). Have you ever listened to someone talk without [...]