Writing Tools

I've learned two words that have helped me organize my writing. One is "coherence." The other is "cohesion."

The writer achieves, and the reader is meant to experience, coherence when the big parts of a piece of writing fit nicely -- like a beautiful handmade piece of furniture. A story may be organized by logic, by argument, by the movement of space or time or by the elements of content or theme. In a coherent story you may not even notice the work has parts, though there is nothing wrong with a reader recognizing that the poem is a sonnet. But when a part of the story or report makes you scratch your head and wonder, "How did that get in there?" it may be a sign of incoherence.

The writer can check for coherence by indexing the parts of the text, especially the beginning, middle and end, and then write subtitles for each part, like this...

In my book "Writing Tools" I make the argument that a writer should know "when to back off and when to show off." The more serious the topic, I argued, the more the writer should soft-pedal the language. The less serious the topic, the more the writer can twist and shout.

Then, one day, I confronted a writing task that demanded I turn my own advice upside down. I wanted, more than anything, to write a funny essay about colon cancer. This impulse was inspired by my pastor, Fr. Robert Gibbons, who underwent emergency surgery after a colonoscopy, the most reliable test now available to detect the polyps that can turn deadly.