A paragraph has unity when the support sentences contribute to a greater understanding of the point made at the beginning of the paragraph. You may have a unified paragraph in which all the sentences are relevant to the controlling idea of the topic sentence, but it may leave your reader somewhat confused. Substantive update Ma(and the PDF now also contains an author-date bibliography with hyperlinks for easy lookup of some of the sources cited). Unity: This relates to the question of relevance and maintaining the central focus of a single paragraph and throughout the essay. 2 pages, 903 words The Essay on Coherence and Unity Coherence and Unity are related, but they are not the same thing. This is a continuing project, with some unfinished business in it. NB While these sixty-plus pages of expository method can be helpful on their own, they are meant to be used in class (eight hours of classroom time, including the time needed to look at student work in class to see how it reads in light of the principles set out in the coursebook itself). We begin by applying these principles of clarity to the single sentence and then move on to the transition from one sentence to the next in composition, where the emphasis falls on cohesion and coherence. The approach is thus visual (prose as a window onto the world) as well as narrative (or “theatrical”), but it is also logical and cognitive: logical because we are asked to make explicit how our concepts as agents relate to one another cognitive in that we want to introduce these concepts in a way that can easily be processed by someone (our invisible reader) in whose mind they are new. In depicting this scene, we are also to imagine that its content (the argument we are making) contains concepts or ideas to which we assign roles as agents doing actions, or acting on a stage (this is the agent-action mode of thinking). So we start out with a framing device: We try to imagine ourselves as writers looking at a scene that we are depicting to a reader who cannot be assumed to have a full view of it. But that in turn means that in the act of writing we have to position ourselves in such a way as to be able to see what our readers see. We can do that if we can appreciate how readers read or want to read, or what they do with the words they read. This coursebook lays out an approach to expository and persuasive writing designed to make it easy for our readers to follow us, no matter how complex the ideas we are trying to put across.
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