3 ways to have more manipulative writing

Writing something can be one of the many ways to produce content. The same way you can write things to help your readers, you can also write things to manipulate your readers.

Following is a list of 3 ways you can write things in order to manipulate your readers, in case your focus is on things other than helping others while helping yourself too. For those that want to appreciate readers, the following list can serve as a sign that slowly more and more people will hopefully realize and identify such tactics and such writing.

3 ways to manipulative writing

1. Write biased articles and portray them as being balanced.

   You can write completely biased articles and add something to talk about contradicting opinions, and thus try to show that you have written something which is considerate to all views.

   Writing opinionated articles is not a bad thing. Writing articles with strong opinions and portraying them as being balanced can be manipulative writing. With such manipulative writing, innocent readers can be influenced into making decisions based on false assumptions or unconscious influences that exist solely to manipulate them. If your writing is biased, simply say so, or at least do not portray it to be something it is not.

2. Present financial interests in the guise of a good thing

   You can write things to protect your financial interests, while hurting something, and actually pass it on as if it was good for others. A good manipulative writing of this sort can talk about some issue and try to portray some opinion as being beneficial for the community, when in reality that very specific opinion may be good for a company or an individual financially. Even if an opinion is good for others, portraying it as being good for others and hiding the financial factor means it is manipulative.

   My article “Case study: The Pros and Cons of banning sponsored WordPress themes” talks about this in a bit detail.

3. Write articles only to please sponsors, yet portray yourself as writing articles to help readers

   Some people write for fun. Some people write for money. Some people write for a myriad of other reasons, and some people combine different reasons to be inspired for writing. You can manipulate readers by writing to get sponsors and by writing only about topics that generate money, yet telling readers that you write only for them. Sure, you can write topics that do help people, but overall, majority of the readers are being blinded by your manipulative writing.

   Writing for money is not bad. Writing only for money and portraying it as writing intended to help readers can be mad and manipulative. Ronald asked about this recently in his post titled “Do you like to thank sponsor posts?” Ronald also tackled this issue a bit in his post about John Chow titled “A surefire way to tell your readers you don’t give a #*$!.”

The above list tells you about manipulating through biased writing, about writing things to protect your financial interest and passing it off as only being good for the community, and writing things only to get sponsors and manipulating users deliberately through that. The next time you see such kind of writing, you can hopefully pinpoint the reason why it was written.

Plan your approaches to writing and blogging to better suit your readers

Simonne’s post titled “Does your blog offer meet your readers needs?” can help you transform your blog and blog writing to better suit the reader’s need too. In Simonne’s post, if you remove any specific thing that benefits a reader and does nothing [good or bad] for you, you can have more manipulative writing.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know. Thank you.