CREATING FOCUS In addition to ensuring that the "given-new" ordering (cohesion) of your information is preserved, it is also important to give your writing a "focus" (coherence). You can do this by carefully choosing your topic at the beginning of each sentence. To understand why, look at the example paragraph below. Good cohesion, but no coherence: 1Romance languages descend from a Latin parent, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. 2English has become the lingua franca, the learned language of science and trade. 3Science is based on experimentation, description, and categorisation. 4Descriptions of the 'northern lights', or Aurora Borealis, often incude the words 'twinkle' or 'flicker' to explain the movement created when solar ions collide with the Earth's atmosphere.   The paragraph has excellent cohesion of 'given' and 'new' information between sentences, but it still makes no sense, because it seems to 'jump around' from one topic to the next. What is the topic of this paragraph? What is it about? The writer just doesn't seem to be able to 'stick to the point'. The paragraph has no 'focus', because it completely lacks a single unifying 'topic'.

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