In this paper I focus on three ways of accessing text coherence: explicit cohesion, propositional coherence and genre coherence. I particularly concentrate on the issue of genre coherence, illustrating my argument with examples from a range of scientific texts. Although the assessment of coherence will always ultimately depend on the particular cognitive and social environment in which this evaluation takes place, genre knowledge can help to fix or stabilise this environment. An increased awareness of the generic features of particular text types can help learners to write more coherent texts.