Analyzing illustrative set of direct mail messages, this article explores textual strategies that invite readers to participate in their own deception. These strategies, which include personalization, imbalance, and competing frameworks, create a type of verbal illusion that emphasizes certain potentialities and eliminates others present within the text itself. Such verbal illusion can be understood in terms of the concept of figure ground, which embodies the idea of visual appearance and disappearance in optical illusions. The success of these verbal illusions suggests that texts have the power to transform perception, sometimes resulting in deception as the reader interacts with the text.
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