Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing

✍ Scribed by Ken Hyland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 297
• Series: Bloomsbury Classics in Linguistics
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

First released in 2005, Ken Hyland's Metadiscourse has become a canonical account of how language is used in written communication. 'Metadiscourse' is defined as the ways that writers reflect on their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. It is a key resource in language as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways and as such it is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context.
This book achieves for main goals:
- to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic
- to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing
- to offer a new theory of metadiscourse
- to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers
The book shows how writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. It shows how these tools help the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis and this book makes this a central goal

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements to first edition
Acknowledgements to second edition
Preface to first edition
Preface to second edition
Section 1: What is metadiscourse?
Chapter 1: First impressions
1.1 A brief overview of metadiscourse
1.2 A context of emergence: information and interaction
1.3 Metadiscourse and audience awareness
1.4 Metadiscourse, interaction and audience
1.5 Summary and conclusion
Chapter 2: Definitions, issues and classifications
2.1 Definitions of metadiscourse
2.2 Propositional and metadiscourse meanings
2.3 ‘Levels of meaning’
2.4 Functional analyses
2.5 ‘Textual’ and ‘interpersonal’ functions
2.6 Metadiscourse signals
2.7 Categorizations of metadiscourse
2.8 Summary and conclusions
Chapter 3: A metadiscourse model
3.1 Key principles of metadiscourse
3.2 A classification of metadiscourse
3.3 Metadiscourse resources
3.4 An illustration: metadiscourse in postgraduate writing
3.5 The limits of description
3.6 Summary and conclusions
Section 2: Metadiscourse in practice
Chapter 4: Metadiscourse and rhetoric
4.1 The concept of rhetoric
4.2 Academic discourse and rhetoric
4.3 Metadiscourse, ethos and The Origin of Species
4.4 Business discourse and metadiscourse
4.5 Metadiscourse and rhetoric in company annual reports
4.6 Summary and conclusions
Notes
Chapter 5: Metadiscourse and genre
5.1 The concept of genre
5.2 Metadiscourse and genre
5.3 Metadiscourse in academic research articles
5.4 Metadiscourse in popular science articles
5.5 Metadiscourse in introductory textbooks
5.6 Summary and conclusions
Chapter 6: Metadiscourse and culture
6.1 Culture and language
6.2 Metadiscourse across languages
6.3 Metadiscourse and writing in English
6.4 Interactive metadiscourse in English
6.5 Interactional metadiscourse in English
6.6 Summary and conclusions
Chapter 7: Metadiscourse and community
7.1 The concept of community
7.2 Community, academic writing and metadiscourse
7.3 Metadiscourse variation in articles across disciplines
7.4 Interactional metadiscourse in articles across disciplines
7.5 Interactive metadiscourse in articles across disciplines
7.6 Metadiscourse variation in textbooks across disciplines
7.7 Interactional metadiscourse in textbooks across disciplines
7.8 Interactive metadiscourse in textbooks across disciplines
7.9 Summary and conclusions
Section 3: Issues and implications
Chapter 8: Metadiscourse in the classroom
8.1 Students, writing and audience awareness
8.2 Advantages of teaching metadiscourse features
8.3 Some teaching principles
8.4 Some teaching strategies
8.5 Summary and conclusions
Chapter 9: Issues and directions
9.1 Metadiscourse and the socially situated writer
9.2 Metadiscourse and interpersonal engagement
9.3 Metadiscourse and discourse variation
9.4 Metadiscourse and classroom practice
9.5 Methodological issues
9.6 Some implications and remaining issues
9.7 Further research
Interactive Metadiscourse
Interactional Metadiscourse
References
Appendix: Metadiscourse items investigated
Subject Index
Author Index