What Makes a Text Coherent?

Pedagogical interest in coherence has its roots in the nineteenth century, its probable beginnings in Alexander Bain's first rule of the paragraph: bearing of each sentence upon what precedes shall be explicit and unmistakeable.' By the end of the nineteenth century coherence, along with unity and emphasis, was an established canon of paragraph structure. The view of coherence in some of today's popular composition texts still closely resembles Bain's original formulation. For example, McCrimmon's Writing With a Purpose, one of the most widely used freshman composition texts, defines coherence as follows: