A drift towards direct structures in Dutch direct mail sales letters

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 done, to see whether this impression could be corroborated. Both studies give some evidence of a drift towards a more direct structure. Some tentative explanations are discussed.