A drift toward direct structures in Dutch direct mail sales letters
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Frank Jansen
Frank Jansen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Utrecht University. His main research interests are the structure and style of functional messages, especially in new media.
and
Ninke Stukker
Ninke Stukker is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Groningen University. Her research interests include text linguistics and genre stylistics.
Abstract
Dutch direct mail sales letters have traditionally had an indirect structure. In such a format, the transactional proposition is presented late in the letter in order to maximize the possibility that the readers will pay attention to, be interested in, and feel motivated to consider the proposition in a positive way. Nowadays, this type of direct mail letter seems to compete with letters of a different structure, one that is more direct, that has a transactional proposition earlier in the text. Two diachronic corpus studies were conducted to see whether this impression could be corroborated. Both studies give some evidence of a drift toward a more direct structure. Some tentative explanations are offered.
About the authors
Frank Jansen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Utrecht University. His main research interests are the structure and style of functional messages, especially in new media.
Ninke Stukker is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Groningen University. Her research interests include text linguistics and genre stylistics.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The creation of an “imagined community” in readers' letters to the Daily Sun: an APPRAISAL investigation
- The linguistic accuracy of chatbots: usability from an ESL perspective
- A drift toward direct structures in Dutch direct mail sales letters
- “You are children but you can always say ...”: hypothetical direct reported speech and child–parent relationships in a Heritage Language classroom
- “Christians” and “bad Christians”: categorization in atheist user talk on YouTube
- Rapport management in strong disagreement: an investigation of a community of Chinese speakers of English
