metadiscourse

English

Etymology

From meta- +‎ discourse.

Noun

metadiscourse (countable and uncountable, plural metadiscourses)

  1. (philosophy, linguistics, education) Discussion, especially involving academic analysis, about a discussion or about discourse.
  2. (philosophy, linguistics, education) Words and phrases, woven into a discourse, whose reference is the external framing constituted by the reader's attention and purposes for reading, the writer's purposes for writing, the narrative sequence or document organization, the epistemics behind the discourse, and so on.
    Meronyms: transition, summative, disjunct
    • 2012, Joseph M. Williams, Gregory G. Colomb, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, Longman, →ISBN, page 64:
      Everything you write needs metadiscourse, but too much buries your ideas […] Some teachers and editors urge us to cut all metadiscourse, but everything we write needs some. You have to read with an eye to how good writers in your field use it, then do likewise. There are, however, some types that you can usually cut. [Examples follow.]

See also

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