Malcolm Gladwell's Uses Of Ethos In Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

In Outliers: the story of success, Malcolm Gladwell tries to prove why successful people are successful. Particularly in chapter eight; Gladwell claims that rice farmers are hard workers, that hard workers are not successful, and that Asians are better than Westerners in math. Gladwell uses many techniques to persuade the audience to his point of view, which he does beautifully. Gladwell uses these different techniques to prove his claims in a variety of ways. All of his techniques can be categorized as Ethos, Pathos or Logos. Ethos refers to the author’s credibility and authority on the subject matter as perceived by the audience (Williams, 2012). Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a bestselling author that doubles as a public speaker (Donadio, 2006); and his experience shows in his writing. Gladwell uses many learned and reliable sources to support his claims that each provide striking foolproof evidence . The author establishes a strong backbone to his argument by making sure he covers all the basics and never leaves anything to chance. Anything Gladwell does

Another technique the author uses is to put you in the farmer’s shoes so that the audience can empathize with the farmer. “Three thousand hours a year is a staggering amount of time to spend working, particularly if many of those hours involve being bent over in the hot sun, planting and weeding in a rice paddy ”(Gladwell, 2008, p. 235-6). Here the audience both feels bad for the farmer and feels the enormity of the amount of work that a rice paddy farmer has to go through which allows the audience to both empathize with the farmer as well as sympathize. Other techniques that Gladwell uses to appeal to the reader’s emotions are the use of a description of rice farming so that the reader can understand the complexity of rice farming, the use of powerful proverbs to invoke the reader, and the use of a joke to include the