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

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 particular genre-based, rhetorical and linguistic strategies in these mailings construct 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 strategies 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, successfully interweaving various discourse strategies and raising both ethical and professional issues in the process. Within the discourse of enterprise/excellence, an active, 'enterprising' consumer is placed at the center of the market-based universe. What counts as 'good', or 'virtuous', in this universe is judged by reference to the apparent needs, desires and projected preferences of the 'sovereign consumer.'