Roberto S. Leon
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
When students think about cohesion and coherence, many of them think about transition words. While transition words are useful, they are not the only coherence moves available, especially when it comes to longer essays. The purpose of this activity is to help students add to their repertoires of coherence moves. In this activity, students will explore how to add coherence to longer argumentative essays through moves such as “summing up and forecasting” (Fahnestock 386). This activity includes a short lecture, group work, whole-class discussion, and reflection, and can be productively paired with Writing Spaces chapters on rhetorical figures (FitzGerald, Writing with Flair), imitation (Meyer, The Evolution of Imitation: Building Your Style), and genre moves (Jacobson, Pawlowski, and Tardy, Make Your
“Move”: Writing in Genres).