Exploring the significant role of meta-discourse in academic writing for a discourse community by academic members

Academic writing is kind of writing in which the writers of an academic community try to inform their colleagues about their findings. When they want to write for their communities they should know how to write for. This issue can be outlined by recognizing the underlying features of a particular community and discipline. Recognizing the features is possible through the phenomenon called Meta-discourse. Meta-discourse refers to the aspects of text structure which goes beyond the subject matter and shows the presence of the author, involves linguistic elements which writers use to contribute the acceptability and understandability of the content of the text. Considering the important role of meta-discourse in academic writing, this descriptive study attempts to discover the meaning of meta-discourse and its two main categories, i.e. textual meta-discourse and interpersonal meta-discourse, based on the taxonomy developed by Hyland (1998a). Finally the researcher proposes some of the main issues relating the presence of meta-discourse in texts.