SURVIVING MENTALLY THROUGHOUT COVID-19: A METADISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A PERSONAL BLOG

Abstract

Metadiscourse is a common tool in understanding how a writer or speaker adopt the linguistic approach to project himself or herself in the discourse which was created by them. It portrays the attitude of the writer towards their own content and also the intended audience of the discourse. There have been various numbers of metadiscourse research in different genres such as academic writing, newspaper articles, education materials and scientific papers, however there are limited research perform on online or virtual metadiscourse, particularly weblogs or blogs. Numerous applications have been built on the Internet to encourage blogging and blogs are positioned as genre of a computer-mediated communication which can be analyzed in both structure and content forms. This paper demonstrates how a focus on language can provide insights to understand the metadiscourse in a personal blog. The personal blog selected was an article on mental wellbeing management during COVID-19. Hyland’s (2005) model was applied to explore the metadiscourse frequency and examine the usage of interactive and interactional markers. The results show that there is a greater use of interactional than interactive markers whereby self-mentions, engagement markers and hedges were mostly used followed by attitude markers and boosters. There is only one dominant interactive marker discovered in the article which was transitions. In conclusion, it can be inferred that there is much evidence that metadiscourse markers are being used in personal blog and the tendency of higher interactional resources used, rather than interactive resources denote that there is a difference in metadiscourse in an informal article compared to academic or scientific writing and that itself is a study that is worth to be explored further. Article visualizations: