Examining Cohesion in Academic Writing: A Comparative Study of Organizational Skills in Pakistani and International Research Abstracts

Abstract

Effective writing demands strategic language use for both communicative impact and structural  accuracy. Cohesion is one of the keys to achieving these goals (Sutherland, 2015). This study  investigates the use of cohesive devices in Pakistani and Native writers’ research article abstracts, identifying the different used types and their functions, using the framework of Halliday and  Hassan (1976). To achieve this, 50 abstracts were collected from two prominent international  research journals (25 from each) of ‘W’ categories, compiled into a corpus, and analyzed manually.  The findings revealed differences in grammatical and lexical cohesive device usage between the two groups. Native writers frequently used reference, clausal ellipsis, reiteration, and collocation, while  Pakistani writers' abstracts showed a higher frequency of conjunctions, nominal ellipsis, and verbal  ellipsis. Consequently, the abstracts by native writers exhibited greater interconnectedness and flow  of ideas. The results indicated that Pakistani writers primarily organized their texts at a syntactic  level, suggesting the need for organizing texts at a semantic level.