The paragraph that explains itself twice and draws the wrong conclusion
A candidate has written this paragraph as the second body paragraph of a composition about rural tourism:
'Tourism in the village has grown every year since 2019. This has created many jobs, and the council has used the extra money to repair the Roman bridge. However, house prices have risen by 40% and young people cannot afford to rent there. In addition, the bridge was repaired last spring. For this reason, some residents want a limit on holiday flats.'
The teacher's comment is only: 'Cohesion and coherence: 1/3. Fix the reference, the repetition and the logic.' The student reads this as three separate small style problems and plans to replace 'However' with 'Nevertheless' and add a linking word at the start of the paragraph. He has a 140-word limit for the whole composition and this paragraph is currently 72 words.
1. Identify the three faults the teacher is referring to, and rank them by how much damage each does to a reader's understanding.
Read the worked answer
1. Wrong causal linker (most damaging). 'For this reason' presents the bridge repair as the cause of residents wanting a cap on holiday flats. The real cause is the 40% rise in house prices. A reader who follows the linkers takes away a false argument, not just clumsy style.
2. Circular repetition. The bridge repair appears in sentence 2 and again in sentence 4 ('In addition, the bridge was repaired last spring'). The paragraph advances by two steps and then goes back one; 'In addition' promises new information and delivers old.
3. Unstable reference (least damaging but easiest to fix). 'This' in sentence 2 could point to the growth, to tourism, or to 2019. The reader recovers the meaning from context, so the cost is small-but it is the first thing a marker notices.
Ranking principle: a fault that changes what the reader believes outranks a fault that merely slows the reader down. Reference errors slow; wrong logic misleads.
2. The student plans to swap 'However' for 'Nevertheless' and add an opening linker. Explain why neither change raises the band, and what the paragraph actually lacks.
Read the worked answer
Both changes treat cohesion as decoration. 'However' is already correct: it marks the contrast between jobs and house prices. Replacing it with 'Nevertheless' changes the register, not the logic, and a marker who has written 'fix the logic' is not counting connectives.
Adding an opening linker makes things worse. The paragraph has no topic sentence, so a linker at the front would connect it to a point it never states. The missing element is a claim the four sentences can support-for example, that the tourist economy has brought money but not security.
What the paragraph actually lacks: (1) a topic sentence, (2) forward movement instead of the bridge loop, (3) a conclusion that follows from the price data. Notice that all three are coherence problems-the arrangement of ideas-not cohesion problems, the surface linking. Connectives cannot supply an argument. The 140-word limit gives a second reason to cut rather than add.
3. Rewrite the paragraph in no more than four sentences and about 60 words, with a topic sentence, clean reference and logical linking.
Read the worked answer
'Income from tourism has transformed the village, but not without costs. Visitor numbers have risen every year since 2019, creating jobs and paying for the repair of the Roman bridge. House prices, however, have climbed by 40%, and young people can no longer afford to rent here. That is why some residents are now asking the council to limit holiday flats.'
What changed and why:
- Sentence 1 is a topic sentence: it makes the claim (money, but insecurity) that the rest supports.
- The bridge appears once, in the job-and-income sentence, where it belongs as evidence.
- 'However' marks the turn to costs; 'That is why' now points back to the price data in the immediately preceding clause, so the causal chain is short and visible.
- Word count is about 60, down from 72, leaving room under the 140-word limit.
Transferable rule: before choosing a connector, write the two ideas it will join and ask whether the second really follows from the first. If it does not, the problem is the argument, and no connector will hide it.