Teaching those missing links in writing

Cohesive devices are crucial in writing, for they turn separate clauses, sentences, and paragraphs into connected prose, signalling the relationships between ideas, and making obvious the thread of meaning the writer is trying to communicate. These linking devices, however, have ben found to be problematic for English language students, perhaps because the methods used to teach them have been misleading. Most composition or writing texts categorize cohesive devices according to function, thus ignoring their semantic and syntactic restrictions, and giving students the erroneous idea that they can be used interchangeably. More effective strategies are suggested for presenting these links, including methods of teaching not only interand intra-sentence connections, but the linking of larger units of discourse as well.