Why does your speech fall apart?
Why does your text “fall apart” even if there are no errors in it?
One of my students and I once joked that my feedback was competing with ChatGPT. He had just sent me a text that AI had edited from top to bottom. Everything looked flawless: strong vocabulary, good grammar. Yet it was hard to read.
📍 Why?
Let me get into the details for a moment. Most often, this happens when a text piles on grammatical structures just for the sake of including them, but there are no semantic connections between sentences. Each of them seems logical in itself, but together they do not form a single whole. The text falls apart into pieces with no “bridges” between them.
🎯 What helps create coherence?
One important but often overlooked principle is information structure: theme and rheme.
⚠Let’s look more closely. A sentence has both a grammatical structure and a way of organizing meaning. Linguists call this information structure.
Simply put, in any statement three semantic elements can be distinguished:
— Topic is something that is already known or is being discussed;
— Rheme is the new information we want to communicate;
— Transition is an element connecting theme and rheme (most often a predicate expressed by a verb, or another connective).
📌 For example:
"My sister wrote a book."
- “My sister” - the topic (we are talking about it) - this is what the reader/listener already knows, a reference point,
- “wrote” - transition,
- “book” - rheme, this is new information that is communicated about the topic and develops the idea.
A well-structured sentence moves from familiar information to new information. A thought does not appear out of nowhere, but “grows” from the previous one. This is what creates a feeling of logic and ease of perception.
📌 How this might look in practice within a paragraph:
1. “I went to Montreal.” — topic: me, rheme: where exactly did I go, the city.
2. “This city turned out to be one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.” - a new topic (or more precisely, an old rheme): city, rheme: first impression.
3. “I was especially struck by its architecture - a combination of ancient buildings and ultra-modern quarters.” - the rheme from the previous sentence is picked up, becomes a theme and develops further.
4. “If I hadn’t decided to go there, I would never have seen it.” - again the topic: me, rheme: trip. That is, we returned to the first sentence and made a generalization - we complete the paragraph and move on to a new idea.
This is how a chain of meanings is born, in which each sentence continues the previous one. The reader/listener does not have to guess why this or that is suddenly said - everything is logical.
📚 Why is this important:
▪️ If the rheme does not become the topic of the next sentence, a gap arises and the interlocutor stops at a loss.
▪️ If every sentence is a new universe, the text loses its internal logic.
▪️Even linking expressions such as en effet, cependant, en revanche and d’ailleurs cannot save a text if the thought keeps jumping instead of developing.
▪️And even flawless uses of the subjonctif, conditionnel passé or hypothetical constructions will look awkwardly tacked on if the ideas leading up to them do not develop logically.
This principle works because it corresponds to the psychology of our perception: it is easier for us to understand and remember information that develops from the known to the new.
Organize your texts—and verbal responses—along a chain of meaning. From the known to the new. From theme to theme. From one thought to another, which logically follows from it. This is more important than 35 subjunctifs in one text. Because a pile of complex structures without internal coherence is like a beautifully wrapped but empty gift.
‼ For the exam — and to keep people listening or reading to the end — practise weaving complex grammatical forms into a coherent response. Use them to carry your meaning.