The illogic of logical connectives

The purpose of this article is to examine the effect of the misuse and over-use of logical connectives (‘however’, ‘thus’, etc. ) in ESL undergraduate writing. It also points to certain types of mechanical exercises commonly found in textbooks as a possible source of the problem. A case is made against the practice of using logical connectives as mere ‘stylistic enhancers’—that is to say, words or expressions that may be sprinkled over a text in order to give it an ‘educated’ or ‘academic’ look. Rather, logical connectives should be seen as higher-level discourse units which organize chunks of text in relation to the direction of the argument. If the links are misused, the argument as a whole, not merely the sentence containing the connective, becomes difficult to process and may even appear illogical. Three suggestions are made to remedy the problem: firstly, limit the students‘ use of connectives to a small sub-set of relatively comprehensible ones; secondly, encourage the ‘phrasal expansion’f the connectives so that the logical links become more apparent; and thirdly, make consideration of the logical progression of the argument an integral stage in the writing process.