Written authorial commentary, or metadiscourse, in social studies texts helps students anticipate context, goals, text organization, and author perspective, and results in texts that readers find interesting and easy to remember. An analysis of informational and attitudinal metadiscourse instances in nine social studies textbooks and nine nontextbooks representing levels from elementary school through college produced a number of findings, including the following: (1) typical textbooks did not make goal statements and infrequently used preliminary or preplan statements about content or structure, or postplan review statements; (2) two of the three atypical textbooks (textbooks written for specialized audiences) did use goal statements; (3) of the nonschool texts, four had goal statements, one had 84 of 106 nontextbook preplan statements, and three had postplan statements; (4) typical textbooks used third person, formulaic discourse statements more often than atypical or nonschool texts; (5) nonschool texts used attitudinal discourse more often than did school texts; (6) the greatest amount of attitudinal discourse in school texts was found at the seventh and eighth grade level; and (7) textbooks generally use attitudinal discourse to refer to concrete people or events while nontextbooks also use it to refer to abstract concepts. (MM)