## Metalanguage **Metalanguage** refers to those moments in your writing when you offer your [[audience]] signals _about_ the writing itself. For example, if your writing uses an [[organizational pattern]], metalanguage would be all those moments (such as in a rhetorical [[partitio]]) when you indicate that pattern to your audience. ==[[Eric Hayot]] defines metalanguage as "language that communicates _about_ the writing that it’s in"== ([[The Elements of Academic Style (2014)|Elements]], p. 126). Although I find it useful to distinguish between explicit metalanguage and more *subtle* signals you might offer the reader, for Hayot, metalanguage can be either explicit or implicit: > "[W]e can stop thinking of metalanguage as identical to what some people call 'signposting,' making, that is, highly explicit, usually structural remarks of the following type: 'This essay reads Milton’s poetry in order to argue that,' or, 'I have three main points,' or, 'In what follows I suggest.' Metalanguage does include explicit, signposting statements like those, but it also involves the nearly invisible action of grammar, rhythm, tone, and punctuation marks, all of which can serve as structural signals to the reader. Somewhere in between those elements you will find x/y or transition-word transitions, which combine metalanguage with words and phrases that belong quite clearly to the prose’s argument" ([[The Elements of Academic Style (2014)|Elements]], p. 126). Note how broad Hayot's definition is: it basically includes _all_ communication under its umbrella. Indeed, understanding that _all_ communication is, in its way, a kind of metalanguage, is arguably a [[threshold concept]] of writing studies. A good example of metalanguage is an explicit [[partitio]], where you say, "I will talk about A, then B, then C." **However, note that when you say something like this this, ==you're _also_ leaving in keywords that you can use later on in your article in more subtle ways==**. If you say, "I will talk about A, then B, then C," early in the article, then later on you can those exact words — A, B or C — to signal the major transitions between sections. ## Subtle Signals Subtle signals are a lot like metalanguage, but they're more subtle. Some people refer to this as **signposting**. The reason why you might want to be more subtle is that it becomes very awkward if you keep writing things like, "I will do this," or, "this article will do that," again and again and again. It's important to learn how to accomplish the same thing but in a much subtler way, so that these signals don't overshadow your main message. This is related to the idea that [[good writing conveys more information than bad writing]]. You can think of subtle signals as being like [[foreshadowing]] in stories. Sometimes when you watch a movie or read a novel or comic, you notice something that's _really important_ and your brain says, "Oh! That's a thing! That will come up again later on." Of course, in the actual story, none of the characters actually said, "This will be important later on," right? That'd be awkward! But because you know how these stories work — you're familiar with the conventions and norms of the genre — you know what's happening. Subtle signals are like that. It's just that the [[genre|genres]] are a bit different — and maybe you're less familiar with these genres. But once you do start to become more familiar with these genres, you start to learn the norms and conventions, and so you start to pick up on the subtle signals. (And you start to _use_ them much more often.) A simple example, for now, is that _partitio_. Again, here's an explicit version: > “I'm going to talk about the **problem**, then I'll explore the problem's **causes**, and then, based on these, I'll propose a **solution**.” This teaches your reader to keep an eye out for those sections: problem, then cause, then solution. It's explicitly signalling the organizational pattern. But imagine you give an introduction, and towards the end of that introduction you say something like this: > “The nature of this problem creates a peculiar difficulty, and that difficulty is a result of the problem’s underlying causes. Any solution, therefore, will have to address these causes.” In this example, you're actually accomplishing the same thing. You haven't explicitly said, "I'm going to talk about this" or "This article will explore this" or anything like that... but you've still communicated _exactly the same thing._ If you were to read that in an introduction, you'd have a sense that this is exactly what the structure of the article will be: - first the article will talk about how this problem creates this weird "peculiar" difficulty; - then, it will talk about how this difficulty is a result of the problem's underlying causes; - and then, it will talk about a solution that somehow "addresses" these underlying causes. Again, when you say something like this, you can leverage those [[keyword|keywords]] later on. Imagine that later on in the article, the writer said something like this: > "It’s clear that in order to **address** these causes, we must blah blah blah...” Notice that keyword: address. Re-read the partitio above and notice how it uses the word "address" towards the end of it. If, much later on in the article, the writer then talks about how we need to "address" these causes, what section is the writer clearly transitioning into? The solution. So even though they haven't yet used the word "solution," the writer has _subtly signalled_ that that's what we're now going to be talking about. Subtle signals are really just ways of looking for opportunities to do things like this.