Today’s blog is a short addendum to my last blog, which was a review of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky. In that blog, I focused on the author’s compelling prose and creative narrative structure. Now I want to highlight another important element of good writing: cohesiveness.

What does it mean for a piece of writing to be cohesive? The concept is not so easy to explain. It means different things in different contexts. In essence, it refers to the tightness of the connections between various parts of a text. Without cohesiveness, these parts—be they sentences, ideas, or chapters—would be awkward and fragmented. In a cohesive text, by contrast, the parts come together naturally as the work unfolds. The transitions are smooth, and the reader is effortlessly transported from one part to the next. (In this sense, cohesiveness is an aspect of plain language communication, which aims to ensure that the reader understands the information before them as quickly, easily, and completely as possible.)

Cod was published in 1998. The Internet was still nascent, and streaming services like Napster hadn’t yet arrived to disrupt the music ecosystem. One of my favourite pastimes was listening to CDs. Like many in my cohort, I had a stereo system and a tall stack of CDs. For me, listening to a new CD had a ritualistic quality. I’d crack open the jewel case, pop in the CD, and follow along with the CD booklet, an insert that contained lyrics, artwork, and songwriting credits.

I sometimes skipped tracks, but I usually listened from start to finish. The songs often appeared in a logical sequence, much like the chapters of a book. It was clear that artist (or their producer) created the track list with intentionality. They arranged the songs in a specific order for a specific reason—to tell a story.

I now listen to music on Spotify. Though full albums are available, there are lots of other listening options, and I often end up choosing a playlist or a station that’s based on my current mood. But the playlists are AI-generated and therefore missing the human touch. To be sure, Spotify has huge advantages. It’s incredibly vast, enabling the listener to find virtually any song at any time. It also introduces the listener to myriad new artists. But on the flipside, it creates a more diffused listening experience. It lacks the wholeness—the cohesiveness—of a CD, and replaces it with something less confined, less exacting, and less memorable.

CDs were a digital blip in time. Invented in the eighties, their popularity peaked in the nineties, before they were eclipsed by Napster et al. CDs had plenty of issues that made them inferior to streamers. They skipped, scratched, cracked, and were easy to lose. So I no longer have my Sony boombox, and my stack of CDs is long gone. Nevertheless, I’ll always think fondly of CDs as superb storytelling devices and excellent examples of cohesiveness.

A Comment on Cohesiveness

Trying to Make Some Sense of it All: Contending with the Limits of the English Language at a Fall Country Festival

Good Nonfiction Storytelling: Lessons Learned from a Book about Cod