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

Abstract

This article explores the functional elegance of direct mail as it con structs its target audience. More specifically, it examines direct mail ings included in a nationally publicized court case involving Publish ers' Clearing House and articulates how the use of particular genre-based, rhetorical and linguistic strategies in these mailings con struct reader identity. It argues that the documents use you-attitude to construct the identity of the reader as winner, implied reader devices to reinforce the reader's identity as winner and to establish the reader's identity as the writer's friend, and linguistic politeness strate gies to build feelings of solidarity of the reader toward the writer. It concludes with the observation that the direct mail in our study, rather than being "junk," is really a skillfully written set of documents, suc cessfully interweaving various discourse strategies and raising both ethical and professional issues in the process.