Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempt an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too – that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated – and that is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.
This is from David Foster Wallace’s essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I may go further than Wallace intended and say that only something was written for the reader’s benefit can be good. This is why I dislike any literature that gives me the feeling that the writer is trying to change my mind in a way that isn’t in my interest. To be clear, I’m not against having my mind changed, but against having my mind changed in ways that aren’t good for me. This is also why I dislike books that seem that they weren’t written for me, the reader. Instead, some novels seems to have been written for Netflix producers, hoping to convince one of them to buy the rights to turn it into a sci fi series.
