Discourse Markers
Global Macro-organizers
Topic Markers Topic Shifters Summarizers
- Let me start with... (Spoken) - This leads to... - To sum up, ...
- The first thing/point is... - Another thing/point is... - To summarize, ...
- What I’d like to talk about is… (Sp.) - It is sometimes suggested - To conclude, …
- What I’d like to point out is… (Sp.) that… - In conclusion, …
- Let’s first suggest… - There is a further problem;... - What we need, thus,
- Let us begin with… - A further point is… is…
- Firstly, … Secondly, … - On (the) one hand, … - In a sense, then, …
- First of all, … - On the other hand, … - The point of this is…
- To start/begin with, … - Thus, …
- In the first place, …
- Moreover, …
- Furthermore, …
- In addition, …
- Besides, … (Neutral)
Local Macro-markers
Exemplifiers Relators Evaluators
- For instance, … - Actually, … - There is no doubt that…
- For example, … - As a matter of fact, … - Clearly, …
- Similarly, … - In fact, … - What we need, then, is…
- In other words, … - The reason for this is… - This suggests that…
- That is to say, … - Indeed, … - It would appear, then, that…
- That is, … - This is true of… - We could say, then, …
- A clear example of this is… - This leads on to… - Clearly, we can say that…
- I mean, … (Neutral) - This suggests that… - So, we must…
- An excellent example of - More striking is… - What is important is…
this is… - As we have seen, … - This indicates/shows that…
- A similar example is… - It is clear from what we - Therefore, it is…
- This is illustrated by… have seen that… - The point is simply that…
- Examples of this would be… - In a sense… - This explains why…
- In particular, … - This should make us - That is worth nothing.
- This is shown by… wonder why… - We should be careful (not) to..
- An example would be… - Not only ___, (but) also ___ - ..., hence ...
- A good example is - Returning to ___, …
to be found in… - Going back to ___, …
- A similar case is… - As we saw before, …
- ..., such as... (Neutral) - Notice that…
- An interesting point here is…
- If we compare this to …
- It follows that…
Qualifiers Generalizers One’s opinion
- I suspect… - On the whole, … - In my opinion, …
- Unfortunately, … - In general, … - As far as I know, …
- It is (not) easy to… - As a rule, … - As far as I am concerned, …
- I am (not) sure that… - In most cases, … - From my point of view, …
- The difficulty is… - In many cases, … - It seems to me that…
- It is quite clear that… - Mostly, … - I tend to believe that…
- What is important here is… - Broadly speaking, … - I have a tendency to…
- It is interesting to note that… - Perhaps, it all is only… - I am inclined to think…
- It is obvious that… - ___ seem(s) to be changing… - I (strongly) believe that...
- The point here is… - In the majority of cases, … - In my view, ...
- It is at this level that… - In most cases, …
- By ___, I mean… - Generally speaking, …
- ___ is important because… - Often… / Sometimes, …
- It is worth noting that… - In some cases, …
- It is a fact that… - Under no circumstances, …
- It is undeniable that… - On a few occasions, …
- There is no doubt that… - By no means, …
Contrast Distinctions & Arguments
- Yet, … (Formal) - The main difference between ___ and ___ is…
- On (the) one hand, … - One of the differences between ___ and ___ is…
- On the other hand, … - One of the (dis)advantages of ___ is…
- In contrast, … - One (dis)advantage of ___ is…
- However, ... (Neutral) - One of the arguments for/against ___ is…
- Nevertheless, ... - It has been argued that…
- Nonetheless, ... - It can be argued that…
- I would argue that…
