A text can be grammatical line by line and still feel scattered. Coherence is the quality that makes a discourse hang together as a meaningful whole for its audience through logic, shared knowledge, and consistent perspective.

Writers and speakers supply cues; readers and listeners actively construct coherence. Causal links, temporal order, and thematic continuity support it. When coherence fails, audiences say a text jumps around even if local cohesive devices are present.

Writing instruction targets coherence when it asks for clearer overall structure. Discourse psychology studies how readers build situation models from text. Coherence is a pragmatic and cognitive achievement, not only a formal property of sentences.

• Overall meaningful connectedness of a discourse
• Depends on logic, knowledge, and perspective
• Supported by but distinct from cohesion
• Central in writing pedagogy and discourse study