Metadiscourse embodies interactions. It is the meaning component of a discourse beyond its propositional aspects, including the explicit means of organizing a discourse, interacting with the reader, as well as expressing the writer’s attitude toward either its content or the reader. This paper investigates a type of clause-level metadiscourse resources that are characteristic of academic English but have not aroused wide interest, namely, Functional Sentence Stems (FSSs), with a view to characterizing their most prominent interactive metadiscourse functions as frame markers, endophoric markers, and evidentials. In terms of discourse strategies, we classify frame markers under “locating” resources, while endophoric markers and evidentials under “linking” resources. It is found that the academic writer tactically use both discourse strategies to effectively manage information, organize discourse, direct the reader’s reception of the text in a way preferred by the writer, and hereby to realize the communicative goal of “academic interaction”.