Metacommentaries make discussion of any problem more individual, it helps to make sure that the problem is dwelt upon from personal point of view and that the teller does not want to sound too publicly and expresses only is/her own opinion. The metacommentaries are aimed at helping the teller not only to express his/her personal opinion but also to make sure that the audience has correctly understood what has already been said.
Reading the article Nuclear Waste by Richard A. Muller, it is possible to come across a number of different metacommentaries used by the author with the purpose to make sure that the readers can correctly understand the reasons of the elaborated information and make sure that the data presented in the discussion is valid but with the shade of personal meaning.
Reading the article, it should be mentioned that the author does not use metacommentaries too often. The article is divided into two parts, the first part offers the facts about nuclear wastes, danger of fossil fuel plants and the places where wastes are stored. Even though the author tries to sound firm and offers just statistical information and facts, he is unable to express the ideas without metacommentaries.
The main idea of the most metacommentaries in this part is to orient the readers to the information which is important, is to help explain the idea by means of the examples and to stress on the most important aspects of the discussion.
The second part of the article is more important and contains more metacommentaries as the author expresses his personal opinion. Moreover, this is not just the point of view, this is the confession and the writer does not just dwells upon personal opinion, he tries to make the reader understand why such particular actions were taken. It should be mentioned that the number and the strength of the facts depends on the problem.
Nuclear wastes and the confession of the person who worked with those wastes may arouse great deal of discussion and controversial ideas. That is why the author tries to be delicate and to support all the facts of dangerous storing with the explanation and metacommentaries aimed at explaining the previous ideas or introducing the following ones.
Reading the article, I met several rhetoric questions which may be referred to as metacommentaries. The rhetoric questions do not expect from the readers to try to find the answers. Vice versa, the author asks those rhetoric questions to give the reader the answers but in the way to make sure that the reader believes in his/her personal ability to have this point. The author also uses the confirmation of facts as the convincing method.
For example, writing “of course, calling storage unacceptable is itself an unacceptable answer”, Richard A. Muller in his Nuclear Waste just wants to say that he does not search for justification of the actions which were predominantly wrong, but using this phrase he tries to explain the reader what caused the actions and which conclusions were drawn before storing the wastes.
Therefore, it may be concluded that there are a lot of different ways of expressing personal opinion and proving the ideas. The use of metacommentaries does not fulfill the speech with the facts and profound information, this form of speech just helps to express the facts in order to make sure that they are understood in the correct way.