Writer–Reader Interaction: Investigating Interactional Metadiscourse in Advertisements from Arab Universities

Abstract

Nowadays, universities heavily rely on digital marketing and social media to recruit more students and to generate interest in their schools. Digital marketing and online advertising constitute a kind of interaction between writers and their potential readers. This paper explores how such an interaction is achieved by investigating a wide range of linguistic resources that writers use to express their stance toward the content in the text and toward the reader. A corpus of 80 academic advertisements from 38 universities, totaling approximately 2,118 words, was compiled and analyzed using Hyland’s (2005b) interactional metadiscourse. The corpus was searched manually for all categories of interactional metadiscourse, and all the reported cases were examined in context to ensure their validity. The results revealed a statistically higher frequency of engagement markers than stance markers. This extensive use of engagement markers, particularly directives and reader pronouns, is a strong indicator of a high degree of interactionality, personalization, and reader consideration. Universities use these engagement features to position themselves and their students in the world of academia and in the context of interaction, where they can successfully focus students’ attention, acknowledge their presence, and guide them toward achieving mutual goals.