This study investigates the importance of human evaluations of coherence in predicting human judgments of holistic essay quality. Of secondary interest is the potential for computational indices of cohesion and coherence to model human judgments of coherence. The results indicate that human judgments of coherence are the most predictive features of holistic essay scores and that computational indices related to text structure, semantic coherence, lexical sophistication, and grammatical complexity best explain human judgments of text coherence. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of coherence in writing quality.