Metadiscourse markers are widely recognized as essential tools for text organization and for fostering constructive interaction between writers and readers. It establishes writer-reader engagement, signalling relationships, appreciating the reader’s varying degrees of certainty and guide their understanding of the text. It, thus, performs persuasive objectives. Despite this recognition, the relationship between metadiscourse and persuasion hasn’t received an ample cross linguistic study which focuses on the explicit relationship between them. Specifically, the paper seeks to address how these markers functionally contribute to persuasive outcomes across diverse journalistic contexts. The paper hopes to fill this gap by examining the direct relationship between the distribution and frequency of metadiscourse markers and the respondents’ evaluation of the persuasive degrees of the selected journalistic articles.
 To investigate this, the research hypothesized that there is a moderate relationship between the frequency of metadiscourse markers and the persuasive effectiveness of the text. The aims of this research are threefold: first, to describe the frequency and types of metadiscourse markers used in selected English and Arabic articles; second, to investigate their functional role in enhancing the persuasive quality of the text; and third, to compare their usage across the two languages to identify potential cross-linguistic variations. The paper analysed 13 academic articles (English and Arabic) using Gemini AI application, alongside statistical tests (Mann-Whitney U test), and questionnaire to 65 participants to evaluate the relationship between the frequency of metadiscourse markers and persuasion. 
The study confirms that a moderate, balanced frequency of metadiscourse markers makes the text highly persuasive, while texts with either a low number of metadiscourse or highly saturated with these markers will experience a drop in persuasiveness.
The results revealed functional differences in metadiscourse use, with statistical differences being marginal, yet suggesting a strong correlation between marker selection and deployment based on the writer’s cultural and rhetorical preferences. Furthermore, the study supports the universality of metadiscourse, confirming that while the linguistic realization differs, both languages utilize these markers to manage writer-reader interaction effectively.