Technical Writing Class: 07/02/09

Synthesis: July 2, 2009

Ms. Roca’s report about cohesion almost covered the entire session. First, she answered the question which was hung last meeting – what’s the difference between coherence and cohesion? Coherence is the smooth flow of ideas while cohesion is a relationship of ideas if it talks about thje same or different subject. She discussed the different cohesion devices – reference, substitution, ellipses and lexical cohesion. Reference links the ideas in the group of sentences. Under this cohesion device are exophora, where the reference is situational and endophora, which means the reference is within the text. Endophora includes the cataphora (reference forward) and anaphora (reference backward). She also enumerated the types of references: personal, demonstrative, and comparative. Personal references make use of personal pronouns and demonstrative reference is essentially a form of verbal pointing with the use of demonstrative pronouns. Comparative references encompass the general and particular comparison.

Substitution is the replacement of one linguistic item by another. In here, we replace the linguistic item not by a different meaning but by the same meaning. Ellipses, on the other hand, is a cohesion device which omits the entire statement and replaces it with shorter word or group of words. Ms. Roca also had a recall of conjunctions: coordinating, subordinating, and correlating. She ended at lexical chains which are delineate portions of text that have a strong unity of meaning.

After her long presentation, Mrs. Manzano talked about the organization of a text. She explained the different levels of structure of a text – parts of a text, parts of a paragraph, and methods on how these parts are combined. Parts of a text are introduction, thesis statement, body, and conclusion. Parts of a paragraph are topic sentences and supporting sentences. She reiterated also the parts of a topic sentence – the topic/subject and the controlling idea. Moreover, she gave us tips on how we will teach topic sentence to students in a comprehensible way. First, we should let the students read the entire sentence. Next, we should ask the questions: what is the topic or the subject? What does the author say about the subject? Then, we will introduce the topic and controlling idea. What is in the topic sentence(TS) is the main idea(MI); what is found in the supporting sentences(Ss) are the details(D). Furthermore, she gave us the format in paragraph development: (1) MI + D; (2) D + MI + D; (3) D + MI; and (4) D + D + D = IMPLIED. Lastly, she clarified that supporting sentences must “refer back” or “refer directly” to the topic sentence. Her last line was topic sentences (TS) and supporting sentences (Ss) are all UNIFIED. The meeting was really mind-boggling because of the pieces of information that we recalled and knew only this day. What a meaningful day!