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n seen as linked to punctuation, to typographic markers such asparentheses and underlining (Hyland, 1999), and to visual, non-linguistic design features suchas paragraph indentations, structure layout, consistency of tone (of a text) with format or withquality of paper-printing, among other things (Kumpf, 2000). Although visual metadiscourse(such as italicizing, bolding, capitalization, underlining, bullets and front size) appears a lot inlanguage, it should be mentioned that the present study only considers the verbalmetadiscourse.In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in metadiscourse from a variety ofdiscourse or ESP perspectives. There have been a great deal of work on academic discourse,including school textbooks (Crismore1989), research articles (Swales 1990; Hyland 1998),university textbooks (Hyland 1999), Postgraduate dissertations (Swales1990; Hyland2004),and L2 lecture comprehension (Camiciottoli, B. C. 2003). Intercultural studies onmetadiscourse have also been folded (Crismore et al. 1993; Marandi 2002). In addition, recentstudies also give time to metadiscourse in genre-specific analysis, including advertisements(Fuertes-Olivera et al. 2001), academic lectures (Thompson 2003; Hu 2007).Though metadiscourse is abundant and the studies of metadiscourse have beeninvestigated from different perspectives, metadiscourse phenomena are not yet fully explored.Researchers even do not agree on what is metadiscourse and classifications of metadiscoursedepending on different functions they perform simultaneously (Xu & Pan 2005). In otherwords, the theory of metadiscourse is still under construction. Some researchers (Crismore1989; Hyland & Tse 2004; Hyland 2005) have pointed to the lack of a solid theoretical basisfor metadiscourse. It is admitted that a full account of what is metadiscourse and how it worksacross texts can not be given.As what have been discussed above, many different types of studies have been carriedout to study metadiscourse in various contexts. It is obvious that studies of metadiscourse inoral language are rare. Therefore, choosing English seminar as corpora is worthwhile. Thecurrent study will investigate it and try to find out how metadiscourse achieves persuasion.Persuasion, as rhetorically defined, is a class of communicative competence in whichlanguage could influence autonomous judgments and actions of others. Persuasion originatesfrom Latin persuadere, which means a speaker could make others accept his opinions throughcommunication. In nature, persuasion is a rhetorical device. According to Aristotle, there arethree ways to influence persuasion. They are logos, ethos and pathos, which correspond toConnor and Lauer's (1988:146) three persuasive effect appeals: rational appeals, credibilityappeals and affective appeals. Logos is a way to persuade others with logical reasoning. Ethosis a way to affect others through his own credibility and authority. Pathos is a way to makeothers accept him in an emotional manner. What Milne (2008: 101) has defined them issimilarly to the above mentioned, but more in details. Rational appeals are logical lines ofreasoning: arguments based on the structure of reality, offering argumentation by example,illustration and model, and analogy and metaphor. Also comparisons, facts and statistics,cause and effect examples fall into this category. Considering on this, they are contributing toa good logical reasoning. Credibility appeals include the writer's personal experie