13 cohesive writing tips to impress your readers
Table of Contents:
- Create an outline of your ideas
- Club your ideas into subheadings and topic sentences
- Understand your audience and choose an appropriate writing style
- Transition smoothly between ideas
- Make online writing tools your best friends
- Don’t assume your readers know everything
- Be consistent with the writing tone
- Write in the active voice for more clarity
- Explain using examples and analogies
- Include variation in writing
- Add images to break the monotony
- Cite your sources
- Don’t forget to proofread
13 tips to achieve cohesive writing for an effective communication
Cohesive writing is one of the most essential and highly in-demand skills.
It’s the era of social media and content creation, and if you don’t know cohesive writing techniques, you are missing out on a world of possibilities.
Whether it’s an idea, a story, or a new wave of thoughts you want to share with the world – these cohesive writing tips will help you express yourself and communicate better.
Create an outline of your ideas
The best way to achieve cohesive writing is to have a clearer understanding of what you’ll be writing about. Start by selecting a topic.
Then, break it down into key points.
Further, go in-depth and explore all the possible angles you want to cover. During this process, if you feel like your knowledge is limited, don’t hesitate to research and expand your knowledge.
Club your ideas into subheadings and topic sentences
Once you have a broader idea of what you will cover in your writing, group your ideas into subheadings and topic sentences.
Organizing your thoughts beforehand is a crucial part of cohesive writing.
What you are trying to achieve in your writing is flow.
Understand your audience and choose an appropriate writing style
Ever read any article or a book and felt like it wasn’t written for you?
Maybe the topic didn’t interest you, or you do not enjoy the writing style.
To achieve cohesive writing, focus on details like age, professional, and education level to tailor your writing and resonate with “your” audience better.
Transition smoothly between ideas
After structuring your ideas as discussed above, focus on making smooth transitions from one paragraph to another to achieve cohesive writing.
You can jump from one idea to another in several ways without losing coherence.
By using transitional words
Words like perhaps, however, in addition to, similarly, etc., help you maintain cohesiveness in your writing.
Moreover, you can use such transitional words to introduce a new train of ideas. [see what we did there? 😀]
By implementing parallelism
Parallelism builds similarity in your writing by using related words, clauses, or phrases.
Decide on a grammatical sentence structure to create a sense of familiarity and aim to reduce the reading time.
This sentence is a perfect example of faulty parallelism:
When Dave cleans the house, he likes to listen to a podcast or talk to his friends on the phone.
Correct usage of parallelism:
When Dave cleans the house, he likes listening to a podcast or talking to his friends on the phone.
If your sentences are grammatically correct but lack parallelism, you lose cohesiveness in your writing.
By including keywords from the previous paragraph
For cohesive writing, try linking your paragraphs using keywords.
This will come in handy, especially when you want to create a smooth and logical flow of ideas while writing on a complex subject.
By using cues to signal transitions
You can also use visual cues to introduce transitions.
For example, you can maintain cohesiveness in your writing by using H1, H2, and H3 formatting or starting a new paragraph with topic sentences for smoother transitions.
Make online writing tools your best friends
The struggle of going through several pages just to find an apt word that expresses your thought perfectly or trying to reconstruct a sentence multiple times only because it doesn’t sound right – is real and such a waste of time, honestly.
There are online tools that can bring you out of that creative rut in no time.
Cohesive AI
Ever found yourself out of writing inspiration when the deadline is near?
Cohesive AI will come to your rescue.
With the power of AI, you can create unique content in less than a minute.
Also, there are over 50+ writing templates to choose from!
Cohesive AI’s powerful editor allows you to generate, edit, and translate AI-generated content instantly.
The best part – you can also use Cohesive AI for topic recommendations and never run out of ideas ever again!
Online thesaurus
For writers, online thesauruses are life saviors! From synonyms to antonyms to word recommendations – you can find it all.
Don’t assume your readers know everything
While aiming for cohesive writing, it is necessary to remember that your readers might not know everything.
You are trying to bring your readers to the same level of understanding as yours about a topic, regardless of their subject knowledge.
By sharing as much relevant information as possible, you are helping your readers understand your narrative clearly and effectively.
Be consistent with the writing tone
Imagine you are talking to a friend, and suddenly your friend starts talking to you formally.
Wouldn’t that be confusing and awkward? The same goes for writing.
To build cohesion in your writing, stick to a tone that is relevant to your readers.
If you are writing short stories for children, you’ll want to be careful with your word choices and tone. Similarly, if you are writing a thesis, you’ll want to stick to a formal tone to showcase your expertise and knowledge.
Write in the active voice for more clarity
It’s not that the use of passive voice is incorrect.
There are ways to make passive voice work – for example, when you want to stress more upon the object than the subject, like ‘Tina was given the responsibility of handling exports.’
However, sentences that follow the active voice are more direct and are likely to engage your readers.
Explain using examples and analogies
As a writer, you want to make reading more exciting and enjoyable.
Examples, analogies, and anecdotes are some of the most effective tools that work wonders in making your writing interesting and engaging for your readers.
Include variation in writing
You shouldn’t overlook the importance of variations in writing in your quest to achieve cohesiveness.
Using a combination of short and long sentences, breaking down a complex segment into smaller paragraphs, and creating bullet points instead of paragraphs can help increase the readability of your writing.
Add images to break the monotony
While you want your readers to read what you have written, you also need to carefully break the monotony.
Your readers could experience fatigue due to excessive text.
You must remember that cohesive writing is not limited to only textual content.
Incorporate visual breaks in your writing using relevant images, funny gifs, graphs and charts representing data, infographics, or illustrations that help add value to your content.
Cite your sources
If you are using information from external sources, make the references available to your readers.
It is a great way to showcase your extensive research and helps establish credibility amongst your readers.
Your citations are also a great starting point for more curious readers to go in-depth and explore the topic on their own.
Don’t forget to proofread
Don’t leave editing to the last minute – it is as crucial a step as writing.
Instead, take your time in re-reading your content from your reader’s perspective and finding any errors, gaps, inconsistencies, or confusion.
Share a draft with a friend or colleague to get a second opinion as well.
Summing up
Cohesive writing is achievable when you are clear on what message you want to communicate to your readers.
If your thoughts have coherence during the ideation process, achieving cohesiveness during articulation is easier.
Cohesive writing is all about balance – the perfect blend of structure, variety, and effective writing.
With these cohesive writing tips and tools, you are now ready to master the art of cohesive writing and impress your readers with some awe-inspiring work!