📝 Coherence or me being meticulous with meanings in my "Writing with New Scientist" class 📝

To practice a certain grammar structure, I take a sentence from the article and create a sentence frame.

For example, here is a sentence I chose today: "By the early 2010s, primatologists had started to take a keen interest in the findings, with some devising a battery of tests to explore chimpanzee intelligence."

And here is a sentence frame I asked my students to complete to practice the structure in bold: "Writing is a mysterious and much-feared skill, with most people ... ing ... ."

Now look at three examples and identify one that does not work.

1️⃣ Writing is a mysterious and much-feared skill, with most people thinking it can only be mastered by higher beings…

2️⃣ Writing is a mysterious and much-feared skill, with most people spending hours and hours to master it.

3️⃣ Writing is a mysterious and much-feared skill, with most people postponing to get to grips with it.

The sentence that doesn't work is the second one. There is no logical connection, and thus no coherence, between "a mysterious and much-feared skill" and "spending hours and hours to master it." A more logical sentence would be: "Writing is a difficult skill, with most people spending hours and hours to master it."

And that's the way I treat writing. Writing is not about grammar or cohesion alone, in isolation. First and foremost, it's about meaning.

How would you finish, "Writing is a mysterious and much-feared skill, with most people ...ing ... "? Share in the comments. 📝