The study of persuasion in texts focuses on the means and strategies to alter the audience’s attitude and on bringing about a change in their minds. Persuasion can seldom be associated with linguistic phenomena or categories, or in other words, linguistic categories often contribute towards the persuasiveness of a text, carrying other functions at the same time. This chapter will investigate the ways in which persuasion is interlaced with the informative and instructive contents of Early Modern English medical recipes, looking beyond the customary recipe collections into other medical genres and the recipes embedded in their texts. The approach adopts metadiscourse analysis as a tool to map linguistic item inventories by which to anchor the classical concepts of persuasion to linguistic phenomena. The study suggests that persuasion in medical recipes resides in such linguistic phenomena that can be identified by metadiscourse categories. The approach provides a useful tool for triangulating one’s observations about the persuasiveness of a text. One of the trends emerging in the Early Modern English period is the increasing variety of metadiscourse classes used in recipes.

Chapter 12 describe different types of intelligent evaluation. At all group levels, most CI practices are reliant on some degree of explicit evaluation of the collective work. Digital technology also makes it possible to design metacommunicative feedback loops in most group work and organizational work. While some systems build on shared coordination, others let coordinators regulate the collective work. In the political system, intelligent evaluations are at the core of any well-functioning democratic system, from the nomothetai in ancient Athenians to the Citizen assembly in Ireland today. These new institutions strengthen citizen metadiscourses about important societal issues. A strong knowledge commons is also an important basic condition for this type of critical discourse. In general, digitized evaluations are becoming more common in society, exemplified by online reputation systems that rate a person´s trustworthiness, not only on business sites, but also in social media. However, there is increasing concern about the negative consequences of having the current focus on evaluating persons in the emerging reputation society.

This chapter deals with the unsaid as a discursive strategy in antipolitical correctness discourse, where the unsaid is framed as something that can be said and needs to be said but is prevented from being said through silencing and taboos. Antipolitical correctness discourse is described as a language ideological debate. This metadiscursive debate involves notions of language taboos, denial of voice and representation, accessibility, and limitations of public discourse. It thereby negotiates issues not so much of language use, but of national identity, democratic representation, and purported cultural hegemony with the aim of changing public discourse. The strategy of claiming to be silenced to increase the acceptability of contested propositions rests on the extent to which silence is at odds with public discourse in modern mass democracies. Its functions will be exemplified using the example of the antipolitical correctness discourse perpetuated by Germany’s New Right. The chapter also aims to show how analyzing metadiscourse can on the one hand be a fruitful way for empirical textual analysis of the unsaid and on the other hand also provides scope for studying the language ideology of silence.