The main communicative purpose of Letters of Recommendation (LORs) is to share the writer’s evaluation of the candidate. Every kind of evaluation draws distinctively on resources of grammar. To this end, Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal System was adopted to examine the mechanisms through which some lecturers of a Ghanaian university express their evaluation in 35 purposively sampled letters. The study concludes that evaluation plays a crucial role in the construal of ideology, voice and stance in the LORs genre, and that the dominance of judgement is a proof of the communicative purpose of the LOR genre.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.