A Genre Analysis Of Philanthropic Fundraising Letters

What makes philanthropic fundraising letters so persuasive has not been fully explored up to the present. With adjustments and supplements to Bhatia's (1998) and Upton's (2002) genre analysis approaches, this research paper aims at giving a relatively comprehensive and thick analysis of philanthropic fundraising letters. This thesis sets out to analyze philanthropic fundraising letters form two perspectives: macroscopically, based on Bhatia's and Upton's genre analyses, a revised move structure is proposed and steps are specified to show how these steps are used to realize the communicative purposes at the level of each move. Also, a cross-field analysis of philanthropic fundraising letters is made. Microscopically, the features of metadiscourse within fundraising texts are analyzed. 150 fundraising letters in this research paper are taken from 74 philanthropic organizations covering five different fields: health and human services, arts and culture, environment, community development and education. The present researcher analyzed the research data from the above two perspectives and found:The generic structures of these fundraising letters tend to display a high degree of similarities. The order of the moves tends to follow the order of "Getting attention--- Establishing credentials of the organization---Introducing the cause---Soliciting responses---Offering incentive---Ending politely". The six moves and steps in each move can fulfill the communicative purposes of philanthropic fundraising letters. The analysis shows that Move 4, Move 2, Move 6 and Move 3 appear to be required moves in this genre, while the other two moves and steps in each move serve as optional tools that writers of this genre can use in various ways to tailor the effect of the letter according to different communicative purposes. The most important contribution of the present research is the analysis of the metadiscourse features within fundraising texts. The study shows a descending order of the use proportion of different types of metadicourse: text markers→hedges→attitude markers→commentary→interpretives→certainty markers→attributors. The percentage of interpersonal metadiscourse is much higher than that of the textual metadiscourse. A detailed analysis of each type of metadiscourse features throws some light on how the strong persuasion in philanthropic fundraising letters is realized linguistically.The research holds some fruitful implications for writing successful philanthropic fundraising letters.