The text has many cohesive devices. There are two kinds of uses of pronouns: ‘She’, ‘they’ and ‘it’ are used to connect the various nouns together; and ‘you’ and ‘we’ are used to connect the writer with the reader, making the reader feel that the writer is talking directly to him or her. For example, in “A beautiful girl waits for a prince to find her. Then she gets married to him and becomes a princess”, ‘her’ and ‘she’ refer to the beautiful girl, and ‘him’ refers to the prince. Later, in the second paragraph, the writer uses ‘you’ in “You probably won’t know the names of most of the women”, to make a direct contact with the reader.
There are also several examples of repetition and co-reference. Girl, princess and prince are repeated, as are man and woman; and there is co-reference in ‘a man’, ‘Charles Babbage’, and ‘the father of computers’. In addition the conjunctions then, and, but, after and so on are frequently used, and there are examples of substitution, as in ‘do it‘ in the first paragraph, which refers to ‘be an astronaut, a politician, or a pirate’. There is also ellipsis in paragraph 2: ‘after you finish reading’, which means, ‘after you finish reading the book‘.
So is this text coherent? We have seen that there are abundant (many) examples of reference, co-reference and repetition, conjunctions, and substitution, and there is also plenty of lexical cohesion around the themes of fairy tales, history, and men and women. For most readers of English, with an ordinary understanding of the culture of fairly tales, stories and the position of women in society, therefore this text is easy to read, well written and coherent.