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Just thought of one other place, where metadiscourse is not only
appropriate, but possibly critical: when building a database for
multiple-delivery (AKA single-source) documentation. Each chunk in the
database should probably be described. In this case, the audience for the
metadiscourse is the person using the documentation chunks in the database
to build a document, and the metadiscourse is probably not going to appear
in the finished document.
---
Office:
mike -dot- huber -at- software -dot- rockwell -dot- com
Home:
nax -at- execpc -dot- com
> From: Huber, Mike
> Metadiscourse has it's place.
...
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Ben Kovitz [mailto:apteryx -at- CHISP -dot- NET]
>
> > Funny that you should bring this up. I call it "metatext" and
> > it's one of my pet peeves. In documents produced within
> > particularly bureaucratic organizations, I've seen documents that
> > were about 50% metatext. An easy way to clean up bloated,
> > boring manuals that no one wants to read is to go in and carve
> > out the metatext. I think it's almost always a cop-out, more an
> > attempt to "look busy" than to say something useful to a reader.
> >
>
