Well, this makes me feel a little dumb...

These are some confessions of a Junk Mail Solicitor.... and it makes me feel a little dumb.  (Entire article on Salon). Okay - maybe not dumb, but a little bit like a sucker.
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...I don’t actually write these letters. I just shepherd them into an unforgiving world. Our direct mail consultant, who does write them, has a nearly mind-boggling amount of data at his fingertips. The mail piece creation process is bizarrely rigorous. Whenever I want to make a change to our tried and true letter to solicit new donors — a four-page monstrosity brimming with redundancy and hyperbole and those detestable ellipses — he can pull up tests he’s done for other organizations, all larger and richer than we are.

He has data on details minute and major. When I point out that it’s weird to have only half a line of a paragraph’s text spilling over onto the next page, he says no, “orphan lines” make people flip to the next page. When I protest that writing “over, please” on the bottom of a page is silly, since everyone knows how paper works, he explains that “over, please” psychologically nudges the potential donor to continue reading. When I complain that asking someone to check a box that says, “YES! I am PROUD to support our shared cause!” is infantilizing and that people hate it, he just rolls his eyes.

Everything about these letters that appears to be haphazard or sloppy is, in reality, a moneymaking tactical strike. Paragraphs that repeat the same information over and over again reinforce the message. One-sentence paragraphs make the letter easier to skim. The ugly layout of the enclosed brochure is intentional: He doesn’t want you to read the details in the brochure, he wants you to take the brightly colored reply form and put your credit card number on it. Everything is calculated to look good, but not too good. You don’t want to look shady, but, as he says, you don’t want to “go begging in a top hat” either. He’s Southern, so he can pull off sayings like that....