Semantic and Lexical Coherence
Jeanne Rosenmayer Fahnestock · College Composition and Communication · 1983
Composition texts often present coherence, definable as the quality enabling a reader to sense a flow of meaning, as the result of organizing a paragraph according to some model of development. This approach certainly seems sensible, since by definition a paragraph is ideally a set of sentences that belong together or cohere, and we can assume that with a model for a paragraph in mind, a writer is more likely to order sentences coherently than if he or she had no such plan. But what models of paragraph development will suffice for a student writer? And, more fundamentally, can every possible satisfactory paragraph be subsumed under a set of models? We now have quite a few items in our repertoire of approaches to teaching the paragraph: the methods of development, such as analysis, process, comparison; some broad taxonomies which identify inductive, deductive, and turnabout paragraphs; and more limited taxonomies such as A. L. Becker's TRI and PS paradigms of expository paragraphs. Also gaining popularity, to judge by recent texts, is Christensen's generative rhetoric, which describes paragraphs as sequences of coordinate or subordinate sentences. Rather than select from these possible descriptions of paragraph structure, some texts give several without judging among them. But none of these models or even sets of models is comprehensive enough to cover the vast variety of paragraphs that make up comprehensible, satisfactory prose. Indeed, the very notion of imposing such models of paragraph development on our students has recently come under attack.1 Saying that a reader's perception of coherence arises solely as a holistic response to an entire paragraph seems to assume that a reader absorbs a paragraph all at once, as though it were a two-dimensional diagram and the reader had a bird's-eye view. While it is highly likely that a paragraph once read is translated into a hierarchically-related set of sentences, it is not taken in that way in the first place. Even though experienced readers may in a sense