It was totally not a lie sweet stuff. Now, admit you thought I was beastly. >.>
Nature manipulation is a very advanced form of controlling your chakra, then changing it's properties into the element in which you want to use. First, you start off by actually molding chakra. Chakra is not something just coursing throughout your body all willy nilly, you actually have to form it in a sense. Your physical energy, and spiritual energy, once molded, become chakra. After that, one must simply concentrate on either hardness, heat, coolness and flexibility, sharp and thin, or for us since we are learning raiton, tingly and vibrating.
Shape manipulation on the other hand, is using this already formed chakra into a source of nature or nature chakra to form a shape. Shapes like spheres, cubes, bullets, etc. are all shapes and some jutsu can be formed into these things. It is all attention to detail, and the more you focus the better the shape comes out.
Nature manipulation usually comes first, unless you are just sending chakra into a direct source of nature. Nature manipulation gives your chakra the nature of an element, and is naturally stronger to regular chakra. Shape manipulation, again, focuses on how the chakra will be formed and shaped. Like the water dragon jutsu, you need to form the water chakra into the shape of a dragon. It just doesn't appear like that.
Lightning release is one of the most offensive elements in our universe, and our ex-first officers favorite element. It is wicked fast and tears through almost anything due to it's super fast vibrations. Due to those vibrations, it cuts through earth as if it were nothing, but gets "insulated" by wind if you will. Some people are able to combine water and electricity to form a thing called storm release. An advanced form of raiton is black lightning which is kind of cool. Sasuke was able to put so much senjutsu chakra in his raiton whilst in cursed seal forms that it turned black as well, albeit different to the third raikage and Darui's form. You can also form a raiton shield around yourself to enhance your reflexes as well as your speed if you are gifted enough. There is only one attack that actually uses a natural source for raiton and that is called Kirin, but it requires a fire style jutsu to prepare it. Otherwise, all of raiton is made with nature manipulation.
Penguin sucks on his water bottle after his little rant, eyeing down Akasha.