A glimpse of my "Writing with New Scientist" class. 🌼🌼🌼

One of the most difficult things to identify in a piece of writing is lacking cohesion. If there is a mistake, you see it. But how can you see what is not there?

But see it you must and let's try doing just that. Read the paragraph below and try to identify the place where cohesion is lacking. Then try to find a fix. Then read mine below.

📝 Original:
"There are several reasons to believe that chemical pollution will be extremely hard to offset. One is that for changes to take place, we would have to immediately stop the production and use of a great number of chemicals, which does not seem feasible. Although there are plans to phase out many of the contaminating substances, the implementation will take decades, which is the time we cannot afford to spend, with the levels of pollution already being critical."

The part that is lacking cohesion is the beginning of the sentence with "Although." In this part, "plans" comes out of the blue - this idea is not connected to anything else in the previous sentence. So why don't we use the principle "old information" before "new information" to fix that?

📝 My re-write:
"There are several reasons to believe that chemical pollution will be extremely hard to offset. One is that for changes to take place, we would have to immediately stop the production and use of a great number of chemicals, which does not seem feasible. Even if the contaminating substances were to be phased out, the implementation of this would take decades, ... ."

"The contaminating substances" is the same as "chemicals" from the previous sentences, so it's "old information." Putting it first makes the text flow better. You must have noticed I have deleted "plans" - well, it's not clear whose plans they are anyway. But I have added "were to be," which is a subtle reference to the idea of plans.

And now we have an almost identical paragraph - which was already excellent in the first place - but it's even more cohesive now and thus even more excellent. 🤘