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.

The study is aimed at finding out how teachers of St. John Bosco’s College of Education, Ghana focus the pragmatic intent of teacher written feedback comments on students’ project draft essays. Drawing on Ferris, Pezone, Tade, and Tinti (1997), Discourse Analytical Model for teacher written commentary and key concepts like “written feedback commentary” and “feedback,” the study, which was essentially a case study, and a descriptive survey, randomly and purposively focused on a sample of 336 comments from 21students’ project drafts of the 2012 academic year in St. John Bosco’s College of Education. The study revealed that teachers of St. John Bosco’s College of Education employed the pragmatic intent (directive type) of ‘make suggestion/request’, as a way of getting students to rework their project drafts. The study raises some implications for writing instruction, theory and analyses of teacher written feedback commentary.

Writing a thesis in a second language (L2) remains a considerable challenge. By drawing on the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), this study explored the way students of St. John Bosco's College of Education engage with the academic discourse community in their undergraduate (diploma) project writing. The data comprised introduction and conclusion sections of thirty (30) purposively sampled project works. Engagement items in the project works were examined manually. The results revealed that expand engagement markers were more frequently used than contract engagement markers, that deny was the dominant type of contract engagement markers, and that acknowledge was the most favored subtype of the expand engagement markers. This study confirms that an engagement system is a key tool to help novice writers align authorial voices with readers, thereby achieving promotional and persuasive purposes. The findings are of potential interest to other novice research writers and their examiners in future project work writing and examinations.