Cohesion and Coherence in Chapter 1 of A Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemingway

• choose a piece of short prose writing (see excerpt below) and analyze how the passage is constructed as patterns in paragraphing can have a significant impact on the mood of a prose piece. When examining the construction of paragraphs, note particularly the order of information, cohesive devices, and other kinds of “movement” or development in the paragraphs.
• MUST include specific examples from text. Cohesion: Sentence in paragraphs should “belong” together; well-constructed paragraphs will make full use of various cohesive devices. Paragraphs with very clear transition (however, lastly, etc.), for example, tend to be technical, while those with more subtle, creative devices are considered artistic or literary.
• Coherence: Coherence refers to the patterns through which the writer presents his/her information. For instance, does the writer follow the standard known-and-new pattern connecting his/her ideas? While, there is almost no limit to the patterns writers can create; the key is to pinpoint the main idea and discern a pattern from there.
• Here is the passage to use: The following paragraph opens Chapter 1 of A Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemingway “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
• In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.
• The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
• The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plains the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery.
• In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.”