Day 292: Reduce or avoid metadiscourse.

Metadiscourse is writing about what you are writing or will write. Sometimes, metadiscourse provides signposts to organize the information. An example is “First, I will discuss . . . .” Other times, metadiscourse may be used to indicate a specific topic, such as “An important topic that deserves our consideration is . . . .” In even other cases metadiscourse discusses the writer’s opinion about the topic, as in this case: “Although I was expecting to discover . . . .”

Direct, active writing will avoid or, at a minimum, reduce metadiscourse. It is generally unnecessary. Consider these sentences, each of which has an example of metadiscourse.

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“The first issue to understand is that youth sports are not for all youths. To understand this point, you need to consider the wide range of interests that youths have.”

Each of these sentences begins with metadiscourse about the topic that adds no value to the point the writer is making.

When we remove the metadiscourse, we get these clean, direct, and active sentences that contain all the essential content and present it more persuasively.

“Youth sports are not for all youth, considering the wide range of youths’ interests.”

In complex and lengthy documents, some metadiscourse may be useful to help the reader organize and differentiate the information. Other than for that purpose, most metadiscourse can be avoided.