Cohesion means the ties and connections that exist within texts; it is the grammatical and/or lexical relationships between the different elements of a text. This may be the relationship between different sentences or between parts of a sentence. Cohesion concerns the surface structure of a text. It can be defined as the network of lexical, grammatical and other relations that link various parts of a text.

Coherence means the connections that create a meaningful interpretation of texts. It is the relationships which link the meanings of utterances in a discourse or of the sentences in text. It concerns people's ability to match the text with their experience or their understanding of the word. If a stretch of language is in line with some experience or their “common sense”, it will be recognized as a meaningful text.

Coherence is a very general principle of interpretation of language in context. It has fewer formal linguistic features and it deals with text as a whole on the basis of semantic relationships. Cohesion possesses more formal linguistic features. And it deals with semantic relationships between sentences and within sentences. It is determined by lexically and grammatically overt intersentential relationships.