Composition theory accounts of coherence have tended to look at relationships within the text rather than at those between the text and the real world. In fact, empirical evidence suggests that the relationships between the text and the real world may be just as important for coherence. Forty-eight short papers were selected at random from those written for the English compostion test at the University of British Columbia. The papers were rated by four trained readers on coherence factors such as flow, organization, and the accessibility of the main point. The papers were then subjected to analysis for t-unit topics to determine which of them were related to a previous sentence element, either topic or comment, and which were not. The percentage of topics having no linguistic relationship to an element was determined and correlated with total scores. Results indicated that coherence judgments by readers did not depend on a greater number of linguistic relationships among topics, but seemed to depend on messages with deictic anchors, or referents that direct the reader's attention to specific points in time and space. (CRH)