Metadiscourse has always been something of a confusing term, often described as simply 'discourse about discourse' or 'talk about talk', definitions which spotlight its role of looking inward to allude to features of the text itself. But this is a very incomplete and disappointing view of a concept which has huge potential to include aspects of language which describe not only how people organize their opinions, but also how they connect with their readers or listeners. This confusion is commented by Swales (1990: 188) and by Nash (1992), who remarks that while the notion is easy to accept in principle, it is more difficult to set up its
