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Analysis Of The Ketchup Conundrum By Malcolm Gladwell

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In the article “The Ketchup Conundrum” (2004), Malcolm Gladwell, longtime journalist with The New Yorker, justifies that perfection is plural in nature, and in an attempt to find perfection for the general public one will only achieve perfection from the perspective of a paucity of people. Gladwell proves this notion by discussing statistics that show the fault in singular perfection (“...data were a mess-there wasn’t a pattern”) by including proof of discrepancies (“...everyone had a slightly different definition of...perfect...”) through success stories that appear inapplicable to ketchup (“...the rules...which apply to...virtually everything in the super market, don’t apply to ketchup.”), and by leading readers to the discovery that Heinz …show more content…

Gladwell develops this idea that some forms of plagiarism aren’t crimes by using the similarities that occur in music “he sat down at the piano again and played the beginning of both songs, one after the other; sure enough, they sounded strikingly similar... Same sequence,” and proposes that, specifically in the music industry, one cannot place ownership on notes because they are just pitches on a scale that any one can play; however plagiarism exists when a well-known sequence of notes is reproduced and replicated with full knowledge of one’s act of replication. Using examples from many different pop-culture genres (music, theatre), Gladwell provides instances in which plagiarism is overlooked as mere coincidence, as well as instances in which plagiarism results in a destroyed reputation (British playwright Bryony Lavery, Frozen), or loss of employment (Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) in order to provoke discussion about the severity of plagiarism, and illustrate how ideas become “...part of the archive of human knowledge...and, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they

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As I engage this unit’s Read and Attend assignments, I find that my understanding of plagiarism is not as fully developed as I had previously thought. Our Unit 3 Attend assignment shares that “in a general sense plagiarism may be caused by carelessness” and these circumstances frequently precipitate the lack of care required while writing (Bethel University, 2014, p. 11). The academic integrity tutorial provided additional information which I found valuable as well. Common themes within each unit assignment provide strands of continuity, while assisting with a more comprehensive understanding. It is my opinion, the type of plagiarism that is hardest for me to avoid is “plagiaphrasing”, also known as “lazy paraphrasing” (Bethel University, 2014, p. 12).

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Everyday economics and social epidemics are topics that do not come easily to many people. The job of Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, was to explain and teach the science of economics. Economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner also had the task of doing the same, but their book Freakonomics, did so differently. That difference includes several components of the book: the structure, the main focus, and the connection to the audience. The Tipping Point shows a better use of these three components and therefore, Gladwell gave the readers a better understanding of the text and the idea behind it.

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In Malcolm Gladwell’s Ted Talk “Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce,” he uses rhetorical devices like pathos, logos and ethos to argue that the people can’t always explain what they want or what will make us the happiest. Gladwell talks about Howard Moskowitz and how he helped Ragu to understand that there is no ‘good’ tomato sauce, but the one a single person prefers over another. There should be lots of variety, because all different types of people have their own preference and being the company that supplies it would give you the upper hand. By talking about Howard Moskowitz, Gladwell is using ethos. Moskowitz is a credible source, making the argument Gladwell is trying to convey convincible.

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This is why he believes by publishing names of students who plagiarized correct. This way students of his class will understand that they must change their habits earlier on in their career. It will be clear to them than that plagiarism is not going to help them in the long run and only create much more severe consequences in the real world. These are the main premises of Loye Young's

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Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School conveys the ideas of honor, identity, voice and competition through the experiences of a boy who attends a preparatory school in the 1960s. The unnamed narrator’s actions are caused by the visiting writers, who definitely influence the narrator more negatively. Although the purpose of the famous writers visiting the school is to influence the narrator at the prep school more positively by helping him build character and allowing him to pursue perseverance, in reality the pressure the writers add discourages the narrator from finding his own voice and adds even more competition to an already extremely competitive school. This results in the narrator experiencing problems of plagiarizing, the search for his voice

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Gladwell, using this writing technique, builds a common belief up, then proceeds to knock it down; some argue if this method is effective. Gladwell incorporates the straw man theory into most of his essays; including “The Ketchup Conundrum” and “Something Borrowed.” To begin, "The Ketchup Conundrum" presents the question, "Why is there only one specific type of ketchup, yet many variations of other condiments?" In this article it is explained how Jim Wigeon, a ketchup connoisseur and entrepreneur, conducted research and came to the conclusion that most people continued to buy the same brand because they “had been eating bad ketchup their whole life!” (Gladwell 35) The resolution is simple, he said, create a better ketchup, just like the way he had created a better mustard.

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It's two o'clock in the morning, and a student sits in a dark, quiet bedroom, his face illuminated only by the glow of his laptop. The silence is punctuated by the rhythmic tapping of keys as he struggles through composing the fifth page of the twenty that are required for his research paper due tomorrow morning, only a few short hours away. The student begins the slow, grueling process of paraphrasing and citing his source, when suddenly, a sense of overwhelming fatigue falls over him. Giving up, he copies and pastes the information into his own document, scrambling it a bit before printing it out and shoving it in his binder. A situation like the one this student encountered is not uncommon, but the choice to plagiarize has innumerable consequences

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