Cohesion in writing: Won’t anybody think about paragraph two?

 We, generally, spend an inordinate amount of time writing openings to texts. We are happy to analyse openings to texts. We are happy to get students to practice opening paragraphs. We are happy for students to experiment with how to start a speech. And, over the years, I’d say rarely is the problem in writing localised to the opening. I’d be bold to say that most students get it. They get that the opening should be interesting and engaging. Rarely do I read the opening to a story and go, ‘yawn’. Rarely do I read the opening to a piece of non-fiction writing and shout, ‘BORING!’. They get it. 

Most of the time, I read their texts and I am engaged. The problem comes after the opening. Yes, some openings are better than others and show confidence, tone and subtlety, but, for the most, they do the job. Signal intent. Tease the reader with something interesting. And, be a bit more interesting than a Geography essay. It is the paragraph after the introduction where the rot comes in. My reading flow crashes into the wall. The development of writing is a major problem for all teachers of writing. How do you get students to develop their writing? 

The relationship between the introduction and the next paragraph is really important, yet it is largely undervalued and underdeveloped. We are so happy that writing is happening that we forget the value of development. The planning stage is supposed to do a lot of lifting in writing. It is the point where students are supposed to structure the writing yet structuring writing happens during the writing. Mini decisions are made, when writing, that connect ideas and parts of the discourse all the time. I think we need to be more explicit about the micro decisions we make in writing. How can I connect this idea with what I said before? 

I have sung on numerous occasions about the beauty of a sonnet. It is the closest we get to the beauty of Mathematics. How the components link and connect is so important with a sonnet. That form, because it is so tight and small, forces cohesion. Rhyme scheme. Structure. Volta. Sestet. Octave. All work together to link and connect the whole piece. Fiction has a lot of things that build cohesion across paragraphs. A mystery. The sequence of events. Mood. Logic. That’s why the jar between the first paragraph and the second isn’t so bad with fiction writing. Students know that if I am writing about a character waking up in paragraph one then in paragraph two the logical thing will be to dress or feed the character. There’s a natural cohesion to story writing. Where the better students succeed is by building cohesion through subtle choices? 

Ideas for how students can build subtle cohesion across paragraphs in creative writing 

# Use of phrasing. Dickens excels at this. Having three or so words used in a variety of combinations to seed a cohesion across a text. The danger here is to use adjectives. A nice one to use is verbs. Associate a verb with a character and think about how you can use the verb again in a different context and combination. 

# A motif. Get students to think of a strong image and idea combination and look at how they can reiterate that in different ways. I use a crack as a powerful one. Students draw attention to visual cracks in their writing and they foreshadow the ending which explores a breakdown in a relationship. 

# Foreshadowing is one concept that students easily grasp when analysing a text but it is the one thing they don’t deal well with when writing stories. They are happy to write an introduction along the lines of ‘Today was the day my life was going to change’, but then that one piece of foreshadowing is then dropped for the rest of the writing until we get to the end, probably. I like verbal foreshadowing like that, but students need to plan for it. They need to structure their writing around the foreshadowing and not have it as a throwaway line. Think of how a student could build around these sentences. 

[1] I knew this day would come, but I didn't know it would be so terrible and life-changing. 

[2] Something small happened just then, but I wouldn’t know its significance until the tragedy. 

[3] I made a choice then which would change things forever. 

[4] She knew then what would happen, but why didn’t she do anything to stop it? 

# Light is such a natural cohesive device in writing. The movement of time is a default cohesive device for students. They love telling you how time has passed. Three minutes later. The next week. Light does it so much better. It shows the passing of time subtly and connects the writing together. The darkness in one paragraph links to the sun rising in the next. 

There’s just a few cohesive devices for creative writing. Nonfiction writing is a little more complex and I think we need to work with students on developing cohesion in their transactional writing. All too often, their writing consists of listing ideas rather than developing one idea. That’s because non-fiction, unless we use narrative elements, doesn’t have those natural cohesive elements. Instead, we have to work harder on building cohesive elements. The planned structure for this is so important. I tell students to focus on one really good idea. Then, work hard to convince me why that idea is so good. Their structure is based around the idea and doing something with the idea. The introduction is the stating of their viewpoint and their main idea, then we work around how to develop that idea. How can they develop their point? It’s a really hard thing to change in the minds of students. They automatically list rather than develop. For that reason, we look at a number of structural choices about what you can do with an idea. 

·       Pick an aspect of the idea and investigate it – Parents track our bedtime, our meals, our free time.

·       Give a hypothetical situation or scenario – Imagine parents being tracked.

·       Explore the end consequences of the issue - There will be no surprises. No surprise visits. No surprise presents. Everything becomes predictable.

·       Draw attention to the flaws or weaknesses – Phones are easily lost, forgotten or stolen.

·       Share the emotional impact – Freedom is precious, but parents are looking to rip that away from young people.

·       Share a history of the issue – Parents since the dawn of time have always wanted to know where their child is and what they are up to.

·       Define or give a clarification of something people might not know – Tracking means watching and following the movement of a person. 

Students then look at shaping an argument. For example, they could go ‘introduction - define - flaw - hypothetical’. The cohesive device is the idea and the argument is shaped around the idea. It is quite transformative when students get this understanding. There’s a shift in writing. Then, the practice writing becomes about developing and doing something with the idea rather than listening and repeating ideas.

For me, this term, I have been working on Q5 and getting students to work on that relationship between paragraph one and paragraph two. Instead of asking them to write an introduction, I have been practising how they move from paragraph one to paragraph two. I have been using the following as a quick starter. 

At the start, students just carried on the writing and tended to repeat the previous point. By about attempt number three, and after feedback from me, they started to get it. Practising the process really helped and I can see the impact in their latest assessments. Those micro decisions in writing have been identified and students are making decisions in their writing about how things connect and link. Thinking about what to do with an idea is much better than thinking of what next idea to include. Students are hung up on the amount of ideas when really they should be focusing on their best idea and developing that. 

So, if we are serious about developing writing, we need to be forgetting about introductions and looking at paragraph two. Paragraph two is where we see the skill and the level of writing. Writing will improve if we shift our focus a bit, because paragraph two shows us what a student can do in terms of structure and cohesion. Introductions are flashy, buy paragraph twos are clever. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris