Principles of Effective Text Construction and Organization
Text Coherence: Ensuring Logical Flow
Consistency means a logical relationship should exist between all parts of a text. The ideas developed should refer to the same theme and be related to each other. A text is coherent when it meets the following requisites:
- Perceiving it as a unit of meaning, not as a set of disjointed information.
- Presenting a logical progression of ideas.
- Maintaining the same theme throughout the text.
- Providing sufficient information without contradictions.
- Referring to events that relate to the real world.
Information Selection: Focusing Your Message
A text is comprised of a series of ideas that are related to each other and develop a single core of information.
- Core Information: This is the gist of the text.
- Ideas: These develop the main idea, are related to each other, and maintain a unit of meaning with respect to the core information.
Information Progression: Building on Knowns
Information progression involves the dynamic flow of ideas within a text:
- Theme: Information known by the receiver.
- Rheme: New information the sender provides.
Information progresses through sentences as new information is added to each subject or known information. The rheme of each sentence often becomes the theme of the next, and this is known by the sender.
When the information presented is not connected with the subject or previous sentences, an inconsistency exists. In contrast, when information presented repeats the same idea expressed in the theme/rheme, it is called redundancy.
The Paragraph: Structuring Your Text
The information of a text is divided into subsections, commonly known as paragraphs. These have distinct features:
- Graphically: A fragment of discourse between two separate points (e.g., indentation or line breaks).
- Meaningfully: A part of the written text comprised of a variable number of sentences that maintain a close, significant relationship, developing an idea or set of linked ideas, and thus forming a unit of meaning.
The paragraph determines the structure of the text and aids in better comprehension.
Types of Paragraphs for Varied Communication
- Deductive: The basic idea is presented at the beginning, and the rest of the sentences develop or provide data to corroborate it.
- Inductive: The basic idea lies at the end of the paragraph as a result, summary, or conclusion.
- Framed: The fundamental idea appears at the beginning and is developed below. At the end of the paragraph, the initial idea is revisited.
- Hybrid: The main idea appears in the middle of the paragraph.
- Parallel: Ideas are presented independently of each other, often with equal importance.
Textual Cohesion: Connecting Ideas Seamlessly
Cohesion refers to the union or articulation of the text units that make it up.
Lexical Resources for Cohesion
- Lexical Repetition: This is one of the fundamental processes of textual cohesion and helps the reader understand the text. However, its overuse hinders agility and can make the text awkward.
- Semantic Substitution: This allows referring to an idea being expressed without repeating the exact same word, using synonyms or related terms.
Grammatical Resources for Cohesion
- Syntactic Repetition: This involves repeating sentence structures to create a correspondence between syntactic constituents.
- Pronominalization: Sentence elements are gradually replaced by pronouns. There are two main types:
- Anaphora: Occurs when a text element refers back to another element that has appeared before (the antecedent), re-appointing it.
- Cataphora: This is the reverse process to anaphora, occurring when a linguistic element references another that will be mentioned later.
- Ellipsis: Refers to the suppression of elements that have appeared previously in the text and can therefore be taken as understood without re-naming them. Types of ellipsis include:
- Nominal Ellipsis: Largely omits the core of the noun phrase.
- Verbal Ellipsis: Omits a verbal form.
- Comparative Ellipsis: Omits some of the terms of comparison.
Textual Adequacy: Tailoring Content to Audience
For a text to be appropriate, it must consider rules to suit certain content and the recipients to whom it is directed.
Presentation: Formal Aspects of Text
Presentation is related to the formal aspects a text must maintain:
- The arrangement of the text on the page must meet certain requisites regarding margins, spacing, and the use of headers.
- Typographical resources can emphasize or separate relevant information, such as bolding, italics, or underlining.
- The text must respect orthographic, morphosyntactic, and lexical rules, including proper accentuation and punctuation.
Register: Language Use in Context
Register refers to the use of language by the speaker in each communicative situation. According to the recipient of the text and the channel used to communicate, one might use formal (scholarly), standard, or colloquial language.
Purpose: Author’s Intent and Message Shaping
Every text is created by an author with the intention to communicate something: to express opinions, to teach, inform, or persuade. Based on this purpose, the author shapes the message for the receiver to grasp effectively.