Upton, Thomas A. (Thomas Albin)2010-10-272010-10-272002Upton, Thomas A. "Understanding direct mail letters as a genre." October 27, 2010. Available from IUPUI ScholarWorks. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/2297.Upton, Thomas A. "Understanding direct mail letters as a genre." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7, no. 1 (2002): 65-85.1384-6655https://hdl.handle.net/1805/2297This post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project.What makes non-profit, philanthropic discourse so persuasive has not been well explored to date. Using a specialized corpus of direct-mail letters from philanthropic organizations in five different fields, this study seeks to combine the tools of corpus analysis with the specificity of genre analysis in a way that has not been done before to provide a new perspective on a genre that is not well understood. The underlying goal is to look for a methodology that will provide much of the qualitative detail that is common to genre analysis while at the same time provide the reliability that is best assured by the quantitative power of computerized corpus analysis. Using Bhatia's approach to genre analysis (1993) and his exploratory efforts in investigating fundraising discourse (1997, 1998) as a foundation, key patterns in the rhetorical structure of direct-mail letters revealed through a large-scale corpus analysis are presented.en-USDirect MailFundraising DiscourseGenre AnalysisPhilanthropyPhilanthropic and nonprofit studiesDirect-mail fund raisingDiscourse analysisArticle