In this paper, it is shown that the conventional methods for dealing with the singularity problem of a manipulator can be generalized as a local minimization problem with differently weighted objective functions. A new damping method proposed in this article automatically determines the damping amounts for singular values, which are inversely proportional to the magnitude of the singular values. Furthermore, this can be done without explicitly computing the singular values. The proposed method can be applied to all the manipulators with revolute joints.