Malcolm Gladwell's David And Goliath

Following my reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent text David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, I was compelled to write a letter discouraging further study of the book in the English Language Arts Transactional Focus course at École secondaire Oak Park High School.

Earlier this winter, in my own ELA Transactional Focus course, I was assigned a selection of adult, nonfiction pieces to acquire and read. The end goal of this task was to determine its fate with future students. I started the book having many high expectations, but by the second chapter was highly disappointed. Fortunately, this task was facilitated by a book wholly unsuitable for an audience even slightly younger than the intended.

For a popular science book, like David and Goliath, to be effective in an educational

This is simply not the case in Gladwell’s text. I found the inconsistent and flawed reasoning renders the book a] easy to dismiss (which defeats the purpose of reading it and b] an unsuitable example of sustainable writing. A student could reasonably mimic Gladwell’s wrongdoings in his own work and, worse, think his errors are a valid from of transactional communication. It would be educationally devastating, for instance, to see the writer manipulate a student into using his easy shortcut techniques. When Gladwell yarns a tale about dyslexic “farm boy” (60) turned lawyer, David Boies, he intentionally misinterprets the data. It is not factor A, dyslexia, that causes factor C, a successful law firm, it is factor B, good listening. Legal success and dyslexia don’t have the direct connection that Gladwell implies. This