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I don’t know about calling it manipulative. I remember taking the ACT, and struggling to plan out one of my essays. It was something like “tell us about a book
by mxcrossb 7y ago
I don’t know about calling it manipulative. I remember taking the ACT, and struggling to plan out one of my essays. It was something like “tell us about a book that inspired you”. So I changed details about the plot so it all fit nicely and was easy to write. I can see something similar here, where someone takes on a persona when writing in order to effectively communicate.
- harry8 7y agoThat's entirely fair. Manipulation is kind of what a writer does yet the word manipulative has perjoritive connotations. Many types of writing don't have literal truth as any kind of pre-requisite. Others make a pretence of literal truth to achieve greater effect then basically lie, many autobiographies fall into this trap to some degree. All these things. Differential empathy. Data quality matters.
- manfredo 7y agoThis is absolutely the case. In fact, my SAT prep class taught us that the factual veracity of our essays is irrelevant. Essay scores are almost entirely correlated with essay length as long as spelling, grammar, and basic paragraph structure (intro, body paragraphs, conclusion) is followed.