Hannah McGraw Mrs. Lind English 120 March 17, 2024 Utilizing Grammar, Punctuation, and White Space When reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, you realize that he has a very unique writing style. Gladwell writes in a style called clear and concise. Clear and concise refers to writing carefully, mindfully, and correctly. Doing a close reading can help the reader understand the details and ideas the author is trying to get across. This book explores the concept of intuition and the subconscious mind. Pages 206-214 go into specific examples and explanations related to this theme. In this section, Gladwell presents various stories and studies to illustrate how our subconscious mind influences our decision-making process. He discusses situations …show more content…
For instance, he may employ exclamation marks to highlight surprising findings or startling revelations. By using this punctuation sparingly, Gladwell effectively grabs the reader's attention and underlines the significance of certain concepts. Punctuation also influences the pace and rhythm of Gladwell's writing, allowing him to control the flow of information and guide readers through complex ideas. He may use commas to signal pauses or transitions between thoughts, allowing readers to digest information gradually. Additionally, dashes and ellipses can be employed to create suspense or indicate unfinished thoughts, adding a dynamic quality to the text. Gladwell's use of punctuation contributes to the overall clarity and structure of his writing, ensuring that readers can follow his arguments and ideas with ease. He employs colons and semicolons to connect related clauses or list items, providing clarity and coherence to his sentences. Additionally, parentheses may be used to insert additional context or explanatory details without disrupting the flow of the main
Tony Horwitz’s book titled, “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War” is about the crucial invasion in U.S. history that resulted the start of the Civil War and describes how John Brown helped plan the invasion of Virginia. At the start of the book, Horwitz begins with depicting John Brown’s early life including childhood to adulthood. John Brown was born on May 9, 1800 in the unfriendly peaks of Torrington, Connecticut. When he was eight years old, his mother passed away which made him go through a drastic trauma such as feeling nervous and awkward towards other women.
David and Goliath is the story of a young shepherd whom lacking of any kind of combat training, managed to overcome a giant, who was sophisticated in combat tactics, just using his wit. In modern times, that act is used as an analogy to compare people who against all odds overcome a difficult situation in their lives.
In the article Threshold of Violence published by The New Yorker Magazine, author Malcolm Gladwell alludes to the cause of school shootings and why they transpire. Gladwell tries to make sense of the epidemic by consulting a study of riots by stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter sought to understand “why people do things that go against who they are or what they think is right, for instance, why typically non-violent, law-abiding people join a riot”(Granovetter). He concluded that people’s likelihood of joining a riot is determined by the number of people already involved. The ones who start a riot don’t need anyone else to model this behavior for them that they have a “threshold” of zero. But others will riot only if someone
When we go about our daily lives there are many things that go undetected. One such undetected event goes on inside our own head. Thinking without thinking, an idea brought forth in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, where your brain is processing information that you aren't even aware of yet. Some of the best outcomes are produced from this “idea”. Another huge topic in this novel is the idea of “thin slicing”. Where your brain can come to a conclusion within seconds of analyzing the situation. Thin slicing is proven in this book to be more resourceful than putting any length of thought into a situation. But in order for Gladwell to drive home his ideas, he is going to need the help of some psychologists tests to prove that he is right.
Fahrenheit 451 By: Ray Bradbury Life may be confusing to you when your job is to commit arson to any house that has a book in it. At least that's the way it was for Guy Montag. Guy Montag was a fireman and in the future, a firefighters job wasn't to stop fires, but it was actually to start them. In the future, books were known as bad and shameful and if anyone had possession of a book whether it was in their house or in another person's house, then the house was to be burned.
Malcolm Gladwell’s “Troublemakers” is an article in which he explores the way societies make generalizations. Malcolm explains how Ontario has banned pit bulls due to a boy being attacked and people viewing that one example to be enough to distinguish all pit bulls as vicious and bloodthirsty. He goes on to employ that all dogs even resembling pit bulls or that have some pit bull mixed into them have been banned as well, because anything that looks like a pit bull has now been deemed dangerous for the people in that society. Not only does Malcolm point out other ways societies generalize people, like racial profiling a terrorist, but he distinguishes how steps could have been taken to eliminate the threat of the pit bull but it seemed to just
At the beginning of chapter three, Gladwell tells the story of two extremely intelligent people who have high IQs — Christopher Langan, who many call the smartest man in America, and Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology of Stanford University and his group of young geniuses called “Termites.” A special thing about Langan that Gladwell talks about is, if Einstein has an IQ of one fifty, Chris has an IQ of one ninety-five. He has become the public face of genius in American life, he gets invited on many news, shows, and he has been the subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris, all because of his brain. Once, a neuropsychologist gave Langan an IQ test, and his score was literally off the charts — too high to be accurately measured. He was speaking at six months of age. When he was three years old, he would listen and follow the announcer read
Monmaney, Terence. "Free will, or thought control?" Los Angeles Times 4 April 1997: A1. Web.
In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was implementing its tenth mission. However, the spaceship exploded after 73 seconds because the O-ring seal failed. In this technological era, countless disasters are bound to occur frequently. Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Blowup: Who Can Be Blamed for A Disaster Like the Challenger Explosion? No One, and We’d Better Get Used to It,” suggests that people should not be surprised by catastrophes, and at the same time, they should be prepared for them to happen at any time. People often make decisions with acknowledged risks; the occurrence of a disaster is too complex; and finally, people always place too much trust in technology.
Snap judgements are those immediate conclusions we make when we meet someone for the first time or experience something new or different. Many of us make snap judgements every single day of our lives without even being conscious of it. In fact, it only takes us a couple seconds to decide whether we like something or not. Snap judgements are a mental process we all do unconsciously. According to our class reading “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell, Gladwell states that most of us have experienced snap judgments, but we feel like we should not trust it. Snap judgements are not always precise but Gladwell believes we should ignore these odds and trust our snap judgements.
The novel's dialogue and monologue alike manage to relay the feel of natural speaking such as "I mean you'd be different in some way - I can't explain what I mean. " The contractions “you'd” and “can't”, since they are common in everyday language, establish a very common and simple tone. Stress on the first syllable of "different" reinforces the tone by demonstrating how typically they speak. He uses dashes for pauses and the signaling of associative digressions. Instead of signaling pauses, commas are used only where mechanically required.
The subconscious has dominion over the vast majority of the brain. It holds influence over the vast majority of all actions within humans. It is ironic therefore, that the dominant belief among people is that the conscious mind is able entirely control one’s body. The subtle forces of the subconscious can be seen clearly in Marry Shelley’s book Frankenstein. In which, the protagonist’s creation falls victim to a self-fulfilled prophecy and is in turn met by fear and disgust from his creator.
For instances, in one study, volunteers were required to stare at a computer screen as different phrases quickly appeared and disappeared without their knowledge. These phrases such as “violent” and “elderly” influenced their minds when they complete different types of tasks, such as writing or walking. Their behaviors changed according to the flashing words because the unconscious mind was affected by it, even though they were unaware of these influences. Since their conscious minds were not able to pick up the words on the screen, they created reasoning with the knowledge they did have. As Daniel Gilbert stated, “ their brains quickly considered the facts they are aware and draw out the same kinds of plausible but mistaken inferences about themselves that an observer would probably draw about them” (131). Daniel Gilbert proves that the unconscious mind takes the knowledge one is aware of and creates a logical reasoning behind it, even if it is not true. When Daniel Gilbert says "mistaken inferences" he means that the person is unaware of the factors that influence one's behavior, thus creating a false sense of understanding. The volunteers believed their false reasoning, thus affecting the truth behind their
Research suggests that we can actually influence the human mind without them being consciously aware. “Anything which is perceived consciously is open to ...
The mind is not all consciousness; unconscious motives lie behind some of our puzzling behavior (King).