CREATING A WELL-WRITTEN TEXT

Writing

▣ CREATING A WELL-WRITTEN TEXT 

■ It is possible to view coherence as a feature of a text related to top-down planning and organization. However, a well-written text also has to conform to more local and specific parts of the text, such as choosing proper lexical items and grammatical forms, appropriate use of cohesive devices, and proper punctuation and other details of form.



■ These relate to bottom-up strategies in creating a text. Most experienced writers report that they plan and think out the passage before they start writing, and they deal with the bottom-up process only after the first draft is complete. Others see the top-down and bottom-up approaches in writing as so intertwined that they cannot separate them. 



■ One of the crucial features of a well-formed text is the unity and connectedness that make the individual sentences in the text "hang" together and relate to each other. This unity and relationship is partially a result of the coherent organization of the propositions and ideas in the passage. However, it also depends considerably on the writer's painstaking process to create formal and grammatical cohesion among paragraphs and sentences in each section. 



■ The overall coherence of a more extended passage depends on the coherence within each paragraph or section of the text; this is especially relevant in expository writing. Each sentence in such a piece of paper is related both to the previous and the following sentences and creates, at the same time, the basis for the connection with the following one. Harris (1990) investigated the organizational functions fulfilled by opening sentences of paragraphs in scientific writing. 



■ Analyzing one hundred such opening sentences led the investigator to classify such sentences into five different groups.
(1) sentences that announce or identify the topic
(2) sentences that state a fact or give a definition of the main topic
(3) sentences that show similarities or differences related to the primary scientific element discussed (which could be considered part of a definition of that element)
(4) sentences that identify an essential natural or scientific event in the past
(5) sentences that point out a false assumption or the lack of evidence for understanding some phenomenon



■ Bardovi-Harlig (1990) takes us one step further toward a more local consideration of the "well-formedness" of a text by analyzing discourse pragmatics at the sentence level. According to Bardovi-Harlig (1990:45), a sentence within a passage has three levels: the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic. To understand Bardovi-Harlig's definition, we need to understand the terms topic and comment. The topic is considered an entity of discourse that connects one part of the discourse to other components through the information that runs through the whole speech. Thus, if there is a main character in the passage, most of the sentences are about that person, identifying the main character will be known information, and various grammatical and lexical devices will be used to connect the sentences through references to the main character. 



■ In teaching writing, it is essential to expose students to such different stylistic versions of the exact text to understand what options the English language makes available to them and how some choices can render the message in a text more effectively or convincingly. Such activities can engage the whole class's reaction to given readers or might be organized as pair work to promote discussion of their textual differences. 



■ To create the thread that holds the text together and creates unity and interest, an experienced writer will use the cohesive elements in the language to establish a precise sequence of anaphoric references. Thus, the writer maintains the reader's focus on the topic while distributing new information in consecutive portions that hold the reader's interest and create anticipation of what is to follow in the discourse.



■ The skillful use of these elements develops over time through considerable and varied writing experiences. The final result should be a reader-based type of writing. In the previous example of the brief beginning of a text about Rona, we can see how anaphoric reference links the sentences into a continuing story, thereby creating interest on the reader's part about what is coming next.