"You're a Guaranteed Winner": Composing "You" in a Consumer Culture

Abstract

This article explores the functional elegance of direct mail as it constructs its target audience. More specifically, it examines direct mailings included in a nationally publicized court case involving Publishers' Clearing House and articulates how the use of particulargenre-based, rhetorical and linguistic strategies in these mailings construct reader identity. It argues that the documents use you-attitude toconstruct the identity of the reader as winner, implied reader devicesto reinforce the reader's identity as winner and to establish thereader's identity as the writer's friend, and linguistic politeness strategies to build feelings of solidarity of the reader toward the writer. Itconcludes with the observation that the direct mail in our study, ratherthan being "junk," is really a skillfully written set of documents, successfully interweaving various discourse strategies and raising bothethical and professional issues in the process.