In oral speech, each turn normally picks up from the last one. One person adds new information, and that becomes the base for the next reply. It’s a shared syntactic effort—both people help keep the conversation grammatically and logically coherent without planning it. Writing doesn’t work like that. There is no partner to share the structural effo

le langage n’est pas un mécanisme spécialisé, basé sur des modules cérébraux, et qu’il n’a pas spécifiquement évolué pour sa fonction actuelle la plus évidente, la communication. Au contraire, il s’agit d’un mécanisme plus général qui a évolué pour d’autres raisons, en particulier la pensée.

The main point, however, is not to strive for some abstract ideal of coherence. It is rather for all the participants to work together to become sensitive to all the possible forms of incoherence. Incoherence may be indicated by contradictions and confusion but more basically it is seen by the fact that our thinking is producing consequences that w