This paper examines some forms of speech acts of control, focusing on the means of indirectness and politeness available at the linguistic level in Romanian. The first part is a descriptive approach of directives and requests in Romanian, aiming at identifying the ‘grammar’ of such acts and the language-specific features that allow speakers to use certain mitigating devices in performing them. The second part of the paper is a case study on control acts in Romanian written workplace discourse. The data consist of relational and routine correspondence between a Human Resources Assistant and other staff members of a Romanian company. The results of the study draw both on qualitative analysis, concerning the identification and description of the Romanian patterns of expressing control acts in workplace correspondence, and on quantitative analysis, in order to identify the most frequent linguistic forms that are nowadays used in written professional communication.