Rude 17.7

In this post, I will examine my own writing for cohesion.

Here is a paragraph from my blog. I will bold words that carry over from one sentence to the next and italicize words that are contrasted.

I just finished reading Writing Space by Jay David Bolter, and in it he talks about how electronic media has brought an end to authority in many of the ways Deconstructionism and Postmodern thought has. The fixed literary canon of western writers like Emerson, Fitzgerald, Whitman, Dickenson, Joyce, Milton, etc. have been seen in the academic world as infallible monuments of great writing, and anyone who wants to be considered intelligent or literate better read and understand these authors and what others have to say about them. It was a world of experts. Postmodern and Deconstructionist thinkers made a big effort to show the contradictions, fallibility, and fragmentation of these writers and try to remediate the attitude of worship for these authors and their texts. But he also points out that these thinkers were ultimately unsuccessful in changing how the majority of people think, and that the academy still wants monuments of good writing.

I fell like most of the paragraph is cohesive because important pieces of sentences are carried to the next sentence and elaborated upon. The main subjects of this paragraph (authority and how deconstructionism and postmodern theories challenge it) are found in each sentence. It contrasts the old world of academia with these new thinkers with the combination of infallible/fallibility. The last sentence is the only one that really presents a problem. It refers to a "he" which is somewhat easy to follow because the only singular male I have mentioned is Jay Bolter, so it is not difficult to pinpoint the antecedent. However, there are three long sentences between them. I should have repeated Bolter's name in the last sentence to clarify exactly who I was talking about. The last sentence is an important caveat to the whole paragraph and, because it contrasts what the rest of the paragraph is saying, I think it works that the cohesion also breaks there.