TOW #8: IRB "Blink" (part 2)

The second half of Blink, by Malcom Gladwell, was just as interesting and elaborately detailed as the first. Gladwell is able to fuse his fact attaining skills learned from being a journalist with his clear and exciting writing style to produce a piece that serves as a real eye opener to his audience. Curious minds can gain so much from this book, which uses incredible studies along with other facts, examples, and situations to explain the human mind. Now that technology has opened up so many avenues to knowledge, scientists are able to uncover many things that mankind could never imagine being able to understand. Gladwell, through the medium of Blink, takes all of this groundbreaking information and connects the dots so that anyone with a desire to learn about something so amazing can attain a firm grasp on the intricate subject. The aspect of Gladwell’s book is his employment of layman’s terms rather than using advanced scientific jargon that would go over the heads of the vast majority of his audience. When explaining different terms, Gladwell thoroughly breaks things down so true understanding can flow easily along with his book. When explaining how snap judgements can lead people to the wrong conclusions, Gladwell employed a famous event, “the Diallo shooting”, and explains how it relates to the point. He says, “The Diallo shooting, in other words, falls into a kind of gray area, the middle ground between deliberate and accidental. Mind-reading failures are sometimes like that. They aren’t always as obvious and spectacular as other breakdowns in rapid cognition. They are subtle and complex and surprisingly common, and what happened on Wheeler Avenue is a powerful example of how mind reading works – and how it sometimes goes terribly awry” (Gladwell 197). Bedsides his use of simple, colloquial language that clearly communicates his conclusions, Gladwell also includes oxymorons such as “deliberate and accidental” to represent how complex the idea is. In his attempt to share his theories and the great thought of others in a way that a common person could comprehend, Gladwell’s well known book Blink flawlessly achieved its purpose.