Metadiscourse is one of these concepts that sound kind of abstract, but
that are actually really useful if you're interested in the field of writing.
Metadiscourse is a word that consists of two parts. You can see that here. The second
part is "discourse," by which we mean something like "communication."
The first part is this little prefix "meta." Now, the prefix "meta"
comes from Greek, and it has a whole bunch of uses as a preposition. So it can
mean something like across, after, with beyond, but we're just going to translate
this as "about." That's a fairly common kind of definition. Metadiscourse is
language or communication about language. It's very self-referential. It's a little
bit more distant. It's the kind of language we use to frame our regular
expression of ideas. Now what does that mean in practice? Well, let's look at an
actual example here, and I think you'll you'll see what meta discourse refers to.
Let's say that somebody says you're wrong, and maybe the red
font here will make them seem kind of angry, but that's not necessarily the
intention. Okay, so we have this speech bubble here: "you're wrong." And we can
actually change this by adding some metadiscourse. So what if instead of just
saying "you're wrong," we say "I think you're wrong." You can probably
hear that that changes the tone a little bit. Doesn't sound quite so
harsh. And we've added some words to express how we're thinking about this
statement. "I think you're wrong" -- "I think" is the metadiscourse. That's the
language we use to frame the other language, and so you can think of
language as consisting of a picture and a frame.
We have a frame around the picture and this frame that's what we
call metadiscourse. We use metadiscourse all the time. If you're saying,
for instance, "I will argue" or "I believe" or let's do this or that, in each case
you're providing language and communication to give some context
to the ideas that you're trying to express. And we can add all kinds of
other words, so in a separate video I've talked about what are called "hedges" and
"boosters." A hedge would be a word that allows you to waiver a little bit,
to add some ambiguity or some hesitation. You could say, for instance, "maybe you're wrong."
We might say "maybe you're wrong" and "maybe" is a hedge.
Instead of being really assertive, we kind of backtrack a little bit, and we
say "well, maybe you're wrong." Or if we want to use a booster, which is the
opposite -- where we want to increase the certainty, where we want to add more
intensity -- we could say something like "you're certainly wrong."
And "certainly" is a booster. In each case what we do is we add
metadiscourse to add flavor, to add context, to talk about our ideas and to kind
of explain how the reader should think about them. Here's a useful definition
from Ken Hyland. He says that "Essentially metadiscourse embodies the
idea that communication is more than just the exchange of information, goods
or services, but also involves the personalities, attitudes and assumptions
of those who are communicating." I like that definition because a lot of
writing instructors will point out that often metadiscourse is unnecessary. It
creates a kind of bloated writing style. It creates a lot of redundancy. But meta-
discourse is also tremendously useful. We can't do without it,
and we really have to start to feel comfortable as writers
using metadiscourse properly. So let's just wrap up with a few example
sentences of how to use metadiscourse and what to avoid. The first
thing here is an example of the kind of sentence that you want to avoid. Let's
say that you write "After reading the text ..."
This could be any kind of text. It could be a literary text, a historical text. "I've
concluded hat ..." and then comes your conclusion. This is all meta
discourse. The actual statement is still to come, but this is simply
talking about the process of reading, [of] coming to [a] conclusion. It's all framing
language. Do we need this? Well, I think you can probably see that this is fairly
redundant. We can assume that you've read the text. We can assume that you're
concluding. And so this kind of metadiscourse is often not necessary
in academic writing, and you can simply state your conclusion instead
of saying all of this. On the other hand, metadiscourse can be very useful and
appropriate. For instance, if you are introducing your thesis statement, it's
often customary to say something like "First I will review this
or that." I will review the literature on the subject. I will cover
this first, or first I will argue, or I will demonstrate that. There are all
kinds of ways in which you can introduce the argument. Again, this can seem a
little bit stilted, a little bit cumbersome, and you don't want to overdo
it, but at the same time it's not a problem if you do, because we need this
kind of contextual language to make sense of how you think about the ideas,
how you're connecting them together. Metadiscourse is also very useful when
you're creating something like a contrast. Let's say you say, "While so-and-so
argues this, I believe, or I would suggest blah blah blah ..."
Again, we're using metadiscourse
here to contextualize the information, to frame it, to give the reader a sense of how
it should be interpreted. We could add many many more examples of
metadiscourse. We use these phrases all the time -- phrases like "for example,"
"in other words," "finally," "as a result," "this illustrates," "it appears that." We could go
on and on. The point is that as you develop your writing style,
especially if you're writing essays let's say in an academic context, it's
about finding balance between overusing metadiscourse (so that
everything is self referential) and being too minimalistic (where it's hard to
follow your train of thought because all we have is facts and
observations with no words to contextualize the information). Over time
this will get easier and sometimes you can actually go back after you've
written a paper and just cross out some of these phrases, because maybe
you said "I will argue" but you can actually do without the phrase, because
it's clear that you are arguing. That takes some getting used to, so I would
suggest first of all be conscious of metadiscourse, watch out for it so that
you know what is what, and then start playing around with it so that you
become comfortable with using just the right amount.