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.

Politicians create a political persona with their audience in mind, and their speeches are crafted to involve receivers in a promising future. They intentionally create a stream of ideas to engage the audience and arouse their emotions to make affective appeals. Using the frameworks of Hyland's Model of Metadiscourse and Aristotle's Rhetorical Persuasion Theory, the present study analysed Akufo Addo's address to the nation on October 30, 2022, when the country was facing economic difficulties. The study found that attitude markers, self-mentions, reader pronouns, and directives of metadiscourse markers are persuasively used in the data. The study concludes that Akufo Addo relied heavily on these metadiscourse markers to draw on pathos appeals, harmonise with the audience, and achieve the purpose of persuasion in the address. The findings of the study have implications for reflections on language and politics.

This study sought to establish how tutors at Komenda College of Education engaged students in virtual classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study employed a qualitative approach through the descriptive design. Data was 462 conversations between tutors and students through the WhatsApp messaging application. To ensure anonymity and confidentiality, all personal names and other details were removed. The study established that while tutors posted more messages than students, messages of the tutors were made up of instructions, commands and directions. Students addressed their tutors with high respect. Female students sent more and longer messages and utilized more emoticons than their male counterparts. Contracted and non-conventional forms of speech were very common in students’ WhatsApp chats with their tutors. Both the tutors and students used persuasive words (e.g. please, and kindly) as a way of gaining approval from the other party. Verbal fillers in the WhatsApp group chats performed two macro-functions: interpersonal and textual. Based on the findings, the following recommendations were made. First, institutions of higher learning should provide the instructional support to teachers and students on how to minimize or maximize their own speech differences while engaged in a virtual classroom. There should be pedagogical models in virtual classrooms that allow learners and facilitators to engage in more informal ways. Finally, for an effective online learning to take place, tutors and students should appropriately accommodate each other.