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I find that my students are using a lot of these phrases at the beginning of their sentences:
Do these phrases have a common name?
Is there a special term for such phrases when they do not add any meaning to the sentence they are added to?
The term is metadiscourse, or communication about the communication. Sometimes they help guide the reader through a complex line of reasoning. Sometimes they add emphasis or rhythm. Sometimes they're just noise.
"Use them liberally" (from your other post) seems like coarse advice, perhaps useful until students can distinguish for themselves whether the text requires such orientation, or until they can write the text so that less orientation is necessary.
I would see these as transitions, bits which help move the reader smoothly from one thought (spread over one or several paragraphs) to the next.
I think presenting it that way will give your students a clear reason whether to use this literary tool:
If not, then remove the phrase.
I'm not sure they really have an established, generally accepted name, but I would suggest it would be simplest to call them introductory phrases.
Although I like @Dale Emery's "metadiscourse". See
http://learningnerd.wordpress.com/2006/09/06/english-grammar-types-of-phrases/
for the names of common type of phrases.
If you spend a lot of time talking about what you're talking about or introducing and qualifying statements instead of just saying them, it makes them more complex and tends to be distracting or annoying if it doesn't actively contribute to understanding the rest of the sentence.
Phrases like this can be beneficial if you need to frame a concept in a particular context before stating it - instead of putting the context at the end of the sentence.
In fiction writing, prepositional phrases can be used to set the tone.
Prepositional phrases can be used to set tone in fiction writing.
The first way just sounds better to me.
The problem is that additional phrases like these make the reader save up their contents and then apply them to the rest of the sentence. It makes them think more. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
