Cohesive Devices

Introduction

Cohesive devices, sometimes called linking words, linkers, connectors, discourse markers or transitional words, are one of the most misunderstood and misused parts of IELTS Writing.

Cohesive devices are words like ‘For example‘, ‘In conclusion‘, ‘however‘ and ‘moreover‘. Together with coherence, cohesion provides 25% of your marks in both parts of the Writing test. However, most students have not been taught how to use them effectively.

This post will look at how and, more importantly, when we should use them.

What are cohesive devices?

Cohesive devices tell the reader what we are doing in a sentence and help to guide them through our writing. They signal to the reader what the relationships are between the different clauses, sentences and paragraphs.

Let’s look at two examples below.

The public transport in this city is unreliable and it’s cheap.

The public transport in this city is unreliable but it’s cheap.

There are two cohesive devices in the sentences above: ‘and’ and ‘but’. Both give the reader different signals and change the meaning of the sentence.

The first sentence tells the reader that ‘it’s cheap’ is simply being added to the previous information, however, the second sentence tells the reader that they are giving a contrasting opinion to the first part of the sentence by using the word ‘but’.

In other words, the second sentence is saying ‘it’s unreliable (which is bad) but the good thing about it is it’s cheap, so I don’t mind using it.’ Simply using the word ‘but’ conveys that whole message without needing to literally say it.

This makes our message more succinct and our writing easier to read. But, does that mean we should use as many cohesive devices as possible?

This extract is about 200 words long. How many cohesive devices can you see?