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This article argues that students should be encouraged to use metatext to announce the purpose and organization of their academic papers.
A large body of research, especially from the fields of English for Academic Purposes and English for Specific Purposes, demonstrates how academic writing can vary from discipline to discipline. This research reminds us of the importance of teaching students that "good" academic writing is contextual, influenced by disciplinary norms, methods, and values. This research also makes clear the challenge first-year composition (FYC) instructors face when asked to introduce students to "academic writing." What variation of academic writing do we teach? One approach is to emphasize knowledge and skills that students can transfer across academic writing contexts.
There are important shared conventions followed by academic writers in every discipline. In an earlier TETYC article, I identify several of these conventions:
> Writers respond to what others have said about their topic.
> Writers state the value and uniqueness of their work.
> Writers announce the goal and organization of their papers.
> Writers qualify claims and acknowledge that others might disagree with their position.
> Writers use academic and discipline-specific vocabulary.
> Writers emphasize evidence, often through tables, graphs, or images. (Thonney, "Teaching" 348)
Joanna Wolfe, Barrie Olson, and Laura Wilder have identified additional cross-disciplinary conventions, including writing to a specialized audience and analyzing data or examples in order to illustrate a pattern (47). They argue that showing students what academic writing has in common "lays the groundwork for rhetorical transfer" (61) and helps students see how the instruction in FYC classes is relevant to the other writing they do in college. This article is about another convention that transcends disciplinary boundaries: the use of metatext in introductions to announce the writer's goals.
Metatext in Academic Writing
Providing linguistic signals to help readers navigate a text (called metadiscourse or metatext) is an Anglo-American tradition in academic writing. Although metatext is less commonly used by writers in other languages (see, for example, Vassileva; Mauranen, "Contrastive"; Valero-Garcés; Peterlin), the "Anglo-American writer respects the reader's time and effort, trying to make the text easily palatable" (Mauranen, "Descriptions" 44).
Much of the metadiscourse research has focused on either locational metatext, which points to the text itself or portions...