La persuasión en las cartas al director.

Laburpena

To study persuasion in letters to the editor, this article analyses how the sentences in each text are related, comprising discourse units according to a general process of connection. These relationships are rhetorical, such as proof and justification, and the arranging of sentences into nuclei and satellites in order of importance, with main or secondary information. The summarising process is based on this, with different lengths, depending on the inclusion of the higher nucleus or those of lower levels. The rhetorical nature of the relationships allows one to analyse the discourse structure of persuasion. Applying the distinction between strategies of persuasion based on sanction, emotion and reason, this article studies the supposed death of persuasion, in which one only convinces the convinced. Thus, the persuasive strategies of two letters are analysed, according to their discourse structures and the lexical devices on which these structures are built.