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Blink By Malcolm Gladwell Summary

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Ava Oyen Sherry Lind English 120 10 May 2024 Detailed Conclusions The way an author writes can have a large impact on how the reader views the piece. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, word choice, tone, and many other things are used to support his arguments. The way he writes allows the reader to see into his mind and understand the many concepts he portrays. I believe that the way Gladwell writes assists in proving his arguments about thin-slicing and how it affects people’s lives each day. In the conclusion of Blink, Gladwell writes about a woman named Abbie Conant who did a blind audition for the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. This audition consisted of her playing trombone behind a screen to a committee …show more content…

This insinuates that Celibidache has a strong opinion about his musical knowledge and his ability to identify skill in others. It also shows that he openly admits to being biased as to who can play what instrument. The dash makes the reader stop and think about what Gladwell wrote and how it correlates with Celibidache. Along with that, the dash points out what I believe to be verbal irony. Celibidache believes that traditionally “masculine” instruments should only be played by men who exude confidence, but when he first hears Abbie play trombone we hear him exclaim “‘That’s who we want!’” (246). He holds prejudices against women playing in certain sections of an orchestra, yet he unknowingly picks a woman to play in one of those sections. By doing this, he discredits his own biases and proves himself wrong. This part of the book stands out more and is almost comical, all because Malcolm Gladwell added in a dash. Another way Gladwell uses word choice to support his thin-slicing arguments is by keeping phrases in the original language they were

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In one explanation, he compares it to a woman about to cry. After this time with this woman, it goes on to talk about a time he was beaten and his time in Europe. The final story is about Art Pepper and his saxophone playing after he had become a junkie. He gets across Art’s uncertainty in his ability to play the saxophone after being away from it for so long.

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It takes many other, intrinsic forms (that often happen by chance) for that individual to grasp the top of his field. Gladwell utilize a mix of research and anecdotes in order to precisely bring his point to his readers. His simple and straightforward style of writing propose that he and the reader are good buddies, tempting to pathos to help the reader relate to Gladwell and see his point of view. (Hauk, 2009) This mellow style of writing also appeals to a regular reader: it not only cause the book clear to discern, dissimilar to scholarly nonfiction books on the market, but also makes the reader more interested in the topic because he doesn’t have to toil through the entire academic vocabulary found in other nonfiction works.

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Elements like diction and syntax plays an important role in the development of Malcolm Gladwell's thesis. This summary of his thesis is ‚We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and determine success. Gladwell uses diction and syntax to give depth and understanding to the target audience. In Outliers, Gladwell examines several different groups of people or individuals who went from rags to riches.

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In section three of the introduction to Blink, titled “A Different and Better World”, Gladwell delves into the importance of what his theory suggests. It is reiterated that people should begin to pay more attention to their instincts, and stress less about drawn out decisions. Gladwell even believes that “if we stopped scanning the horizon with our binoculars and began instead examining our own decision making and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes” that it would drastically change the way society functions. Something to note here is that this idea was not stated ordinarily or in a boring fashion; instead, Gladwell decides it would be more effective to personify the subject. Personification often adds new meaning to the overall message of a piece, particularly when done in such a way that it is profound and resonates throughout the audience.

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The last author we had a reading from was, Malcolm Gladwell. His writing was, “Chapter Two.” This writing talked about when people think of advantages and disadvantages, they are not always right about them. Gladwell then applies this concept to two different aspects in life. One of them is education, and the other is how money affects parenting.

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In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he uses argument as his tool to educate readers about the path to success. An argument consists of a claim, coherent and persuasive discourse, and a conclusion; Gladwell’s novel conforms to this description precisely. The author first makes his claim that successful people are not successful because of work ethic or intelligence alone, but that they are a culmination of many specific traits and rare opportunities. Outliers then holds the debate in its 9 chapters. Chapters back his claim in many ways.

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The Vietnam War was a conflict between the Vietnamese government that was under French administration and the pro-communist Vietnamese citizens who were fighting for independence from foreign influence. The United States’ armed forces entered into the conflict in support of the colonial administration in an attempt to stop the spread of Chinese and Soviet influence and communism in the region. The Vietnam War is arguably the longest war, lasting 11 years, from 1964 to 1975, and costing the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and countless numbers of Vietnamese. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War came about when communist North Vietnam sought to unify an anti-communist South Vietnam (Benson, Sonia, et al., 2009). As the war escalated and the

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For the first half of our course in mediation, we have been looking how people typically make decisions and how a mediator can use certain strategies to help bring people together to make constructive decisions that is beneficial for both parties and minimizes conflict. These themes are laid out and explored deeper in Malcom Gladwell’s novel, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This book focuses on how people make sudden judgments and decisions, while never even consciously aware of these decisions or the factors that influenced their decision-making processes. Gladwell describes this phenomena as an “automatic pilot,” where “the way we work and act and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment are a lot more susceptible to outside influence than we realize.” It is important to note that while these quick assessments come from the unconscious and cannot exactly explored in depth, the author argues that ways do exist to reasonably explain these “blink” decisions.

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Gladwell acts almost conceited in getting his concern across to his audience, the over confidence one receives as if he holds all the cards. As his audience trusts him since he gives out the evidence as if he is doing the audience a favor, he displays his thesis through an emotional lens. He uses the hopes and concerns of his audience to manipulate their to view success through his thesis. As we all hope success to be a result of our effort, Gladwell demonstrates how it is not our effort alone, our success is from a mixture of our background, time, and location. (Gladwell, 119)

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Blink, a book written by Malcolm Gladwell where he explains the psychology of unconscious thinking. Gladwell tells his readers about how our subconscious mind affects a lot of our actions and behavior. In the book he brings up the idea of “thin slicing” in which a person uses little pieces of information about a person and uses that to form a larger opinion of the person. Further in the book he continues to say that most humans cannot explain how our subconscious mind works, he uses the example of Vic Braden a tennis coach who can predict when a tennis player is going to serve two bad serves in a row. When asked, Braden could not explain how he could predict such a thing and didn’t know how to explain this fact to others.

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This conversation alone, begins the method of straw man. Malcolm Gladwell uses this same method once again in

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As children grow up, most of them are taught not to judge a book by its cover, but in “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell, Gladwell challenges this statement with the thought that our judgments come from our unconscious that may make better judgement calls in a particular situation better than we could by consciously making the decision. Gladwell bring’s up the term thin-slicing. Thin-slicing is a term used in psychology and philosophy to describe the ability to find patterns in events based on very narrow windows of experience. He explains that our brains use thin-slicing unconsciously to “think without thinking.” Various studies that were discussed in the book-such as the fake Kouros and priming-have been shown to prove that when correctly trained,

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The author Gladwell helped the reader to reach his message by providing characters with common experiences and turn them into positive experiences. He used characters to help the reader to find hidden messages. Gladwell was trying to make hidden messages easy to locate as a person reads deeper in the chapters within the book, he made this clear since the beginning of his book. The importance of the book is demonstrates how a legacy that includes culture can have failure and can be turned around into success just by an off chance (Locklear, 2016). Gladwell gives the reader a sense of empowerment showing the public to feel self-righteous because they too can become a famous song writer or athlete if they to put in their 10,000 hours of dedicated work to what they love to do (Locklear,

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In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, By Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell touches on concepts that provoke thought. Gladwell has, as George Orwell said, ¨[the] Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peopleś idea of the kind of society that they should strive for¨. Gladwell successfully convinces the reader that ¨decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately¨ (p.14) and ¨that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled”(p.15) by using studies and experiments to support his ideas, exemplification to further explain a discussed concept, and rhetorical questions to interact with the readers. Studies and experiments are commonly used

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Blink written by Malcom is an argumentative based research book about how our adaptive subconscious plays a huge part in every day life. It also tells of the pros and cons of our adaptive subconscious. In Gladwell’s Blink he used different forms of rhetoric to persuade us, the readers, of his point successfully. Gladwell uses multiple counts ethos and logos in his writing to get his point across along with pathos, analogies, rhetorical questions, and irony. He also uses his tone and diction to assist his writing.

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