How to write like Malcolm Gladwell
commonreader.substack.com
commonreader.substack.com
But this is an interesting article. The one thing most serious critics of Gladwell --- by serious I mean, not quipping message board comments --- can agree on is that Gladwell is an effective writer. Maybe even a good one? Listen to the sneering "If Books Could Kill" podcast on Tipping Point to see what I mean.
It's not just that Gladwell sells a lot of books. The writing works. It's oddly propulsive, it drags you in. He's not unpleasant to read, it's just irritating to unhitch yourself from it for a moment and realize that the story he's telling or the point he's making is vapid. I get that.
But effective writing is a valuable tool, and a dissection of what makes Gladwell effective, even if this isn't the best or most careful dissection, is interesting.
Get over the Gladwell hate for a minute and actually read this thing. It's not really about what you think it's about.
There's legitimate value in that.
If you use the same perspective of a ted talk, false, bogus, or shallow work is the coin of the realm. He did not let you down.
Mix in his habits of open disdain for anyone outside of the creative class (see his comments on remote work), his books' occasional cultural supremacy issues, and his recent apologia for strategic bombing, and Malcolm Gladwell has hit the jackpot for distasteful writers.
He is, however, as others have noted, a very compelling storyteller.
Take the 10,000 hours claim? Based on very little. There's nothing special about 10,000 hours. And the research roundly rejects the idea that deliberate practice is as big a factor as Gladwell claims.
Do you have more information on this? I know lots of social science studies have not stood the test of time, but I didn't know Anders Ericsson's paper had big problems.
For example, this meta-analysis of sports performance found that deliberate practice was important but not overwhelmingly so, accounting of 18% of performance on average.
It seems like there is a lot of plasticity in human performance, and it may be the case that many of us can get pretty good at a lot of things, but there also appear to be many factors distinct from practice that make substantial contributions to performance.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161663559...
I'd encourage you to look a little harder in the same bookstore section that Gladwell tends to be stocked in - there are _lots_ of candidates for this which are far more convincing.
I've come to regard Gladwell as strong on presentation (writing-wise), weak on content.
He and Michelle Goldberg were beaten soundly by a guy whose first name Malcom got wrong, and a guy whose last name Malcom got wrong (repeatedly, in both cases).
The "both sides" game from the pro team was excruciating.
As an aside, even when it comes to the anecdotes, Matt Taibbi was incredibly disingenuous about the one thing I fact-checked: his reporting on ivermectin. Sure, he might not have said "everyone should take ivermectin." But in the very first interview I hit with him about it his statements can be summarized as:
"Ivermectin is a miracle drug for treating parasites." -- this sets up a kind of expert opinion fallacy: if Ivermectin is so good at fighting parasites, and viruses are sort of like parasites, right? So Ivermectin might be good for Covid.
Then he says, "Some studies have given weak evidence supporting the use of Ivermectin for Covid." This elides so much about those early studies.
Then he says, "And no one can talk about it [those positive studies]."
It boils down to "tell me you think Ivermectin is good for Covid without saying the words 'Ivermectin is good for Covid'" and it makes me doubt anything Taibbi says. And the fact that he can have said that and then claim that he never supported Ivermectin tells me he will lie to prove a point.
> the Pessoa quote, “The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed — they buy little dreams.”
I also related strongly to the leukemia doctor story. I think my rough up bringing made me more stubborn and tenacious than my peers because if I didn’t work I didn’t eat.
I read the Tipping Point in particular more than once, I thought it was so fascinating
I’m kinda sad now
Do not make policy decisions based on Gladwell :-)
Edit : a perhaps stretched analogy - his stories are to me akin to Taylor Swift sharing her story and saying "I practised hard and didn't give up and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams". It's true but not as meaningful or applicable as it may seem - it's insufficient causation and incomplete correlation.
Majority of people who practice hard won't be Taylor Swift.
Conversely,There are many additional reasons beyond practicing hard Taylor Swift succeeded.
It's a compelling narrative but horrible statistical model or understanding of world and causality.
Real science is boring, wishy-washy and full of caveats, as they should be, researchers should disclose limitations of the studies. But because of that, it's not something the average person will find memorable or talk to a friend about.
Gladwell's popularity comes from the fact that his narratives are told with conviction and in a way that feels exciting. People respond to that, similarly to how they respond to confidence in interpersonal interactions.
This implies he considers himself a storyteller but he does not. I recently heard him interviewed where he (rightly or wrongly) explicitly described his job as being a researcher.
eg: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-pop-history-bombs-a...
What story is that?
At the time Emil was (as I recall) treated as an outsider and viewed with skepticism for his work until basically it was irrational not to see how he was saving lives
[0]: https://uofuhealth.utah.edu/innovation/news/2014/07/malcolm-...
> An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
There's probably a deeper philosophical point to make here between "ART" and "SCIENCE" broadly (and reductively) considered, but I see it as a matter of respect: Do you think the author respects the subject enough to write a factual story that portrays that subject honestly, or is the author doing a cleaned-up piece of tabloid journalism and going for readership and responses, and is simply going to use some misunderstood parts of that subject as props to make a Sweeping Conclusion regardless of what the facts support?
In short: Does the author care about facts, or do they care about making their case?
HN brain has it right and I'm patting my own back here too, but HN opinion is quite a bit more well informed than general society.
These sorts of generalizations are very dangerous, because when the group believes them it confers a false credence.
In some very specific verticals, yes. There are also some glaring blindspots where HN comments are less informed than general society.
Malcom Gladwell's book: Outliers, The Stories of Success (2011) is what brought the "10,000 hours to master a skill" quip to popularity.
That book drew on research by Anders Ericson as its scientific basis.
But Ericson himself found Gladwell's book so problematic he later wrote a book of his own: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2017) to set the record straight.
In Peak, there is an entire section dedicated to describing what portions of Gladwell's interpretation is problematic, and how it oversimplified the Ericson's own research.
No.
I think that the techniques for being effective at synthesizing and conveying accurate information in writing are very different from the techniques for being effectiveness at selling pseudo-intellectual just-so stories reinforcing conventional values like “putting time in on focussed hard work is the most important ingredient to success”.
The subtext here is the text of this (very excellent) blog post:
https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out
We all get it. Gladwell trades in "it turns out than" constructions as much as anybody else. But so do lots of mediocre writers. Gladwell is fun to read. People don't read him simply to scratch their chin and say "yeah, that's right, that's how the world works, I should uPdAtE mY pRiOrS", the way they do with other it-turns-out-ists. They read him because he knows how to bait a hook and cast a line, and if you make the mistake of nibbling at a Gladwell paragraph you're apt to get snagged. That's a skill, and it's as superficial and vapid as a Gladwell argument to pretend otherwise.
Those are... not the same.
It's just not the case that Gladwell is only effective when he's teflon-coating vapid, big-sounding ideas to shoot into his readers brains.
Good writing ability (for certain definitions of "good") plus hackery are necessary if you want to make the economics of your writing work as well as he has, writing airport nonfiction books. Writing non-hacky nonfiction is takes a lot more time and (perhaps) more talent.
(The books don't hold up, but some of his New Yorker stuff does.)
I don't think this is a failing of Gladwell, though. He truly believed the Outliers thesis at the time and was, in fact, partially true.
"Range" by David Epstein is a fascinating book.
More generally, a really great writer can do incredibly persuasive things with a terrible argument. It really is a super power.
I'd also say, most of the great engineers I know also write for humans well. I think engineers, especially younger ones, can underrate how useful eloquence is.
I wish this was backed up with some actual links. Even the comments here asking "Wait, what/who/when decided that Gladwell is a farce?" are met with just comments without more information.
Personally, I am aware of the widespread rejection of how Gladwell presented "10000 hours" in Outliers (and by just googling "Anders Ericsson 10000" it's easy to find plenty of references). And, as Gladwell is a book writer with a point to make in each book, I can understand criticism that he can take conclusions beyond what the data necessarily warrants.
But I'm not, however, aware that the "society" "has roundly concluded that Gladwell is a farce". If you can point to evidence of this I'd definitely like to understand this point.
Roundup of a few (follow links): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/02/29/the-patern...
If Books Could Kill (worthwhile, as is the Freakonomics episode of the same podcast): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/malcolm-gladwells-outl...
To an extent, it's salutary: the whole TED-adjacent ecosystem favors storytellers over actual expertise, and it's helpful for me [an author of grant proposals] to review cases where compelling storytelling went too far.
Gladwell is an engaging writer and spins (too good of) a tale. I think reading The Tipping Point fresh some of the characteristics he came to be criticized for weren't as prevalent. But, as with you, once you knew what to look for from reading other books and critiques of them you realize they were there in The Tipping Point too, albeit in more muted form.
He's a very entertaining writer, and effective at telling stories - definitely lessons to be learned from his style.
As LA Review of Books put it, "The only issue is that Gladwell’s account doesn’t withstand serious scrutiny. "
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Gladwell - he's a great story teller, and the only issue is that he pretends they are true. (When he either made them up, or he just really didn't understand the problem)
Gladwell is in many ways an incorporation of all that's wrong with journalism. Writing for effect, focused exclusively on drawing eyeballs in. Yes, he's successful at it. Yes, you could learn from him, but you're always in danger of accidentally learning that style trumps substance.
Every chapter of every book follows the same formula, but it works and it's fun to read. And while arguably he's kind of a grifter who set back society by a couple of decades, he might still have claim to be being the most important writer of our times.
But I don't think he set back society at all, really. He just didn't move it forward, either. (His podcast series about what colleges spend money on is pretty solid, though.)
Mainstream political support of VAM in education traces back to Outliers.
Diane Ravitch has an entire book about this. If you read the two chapters about the epistemology of the statistics behind VAM, you can see it's actually pretty similar to Theranos, an idea that can't even work on principle regardless of the technology or how it's implemented:
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp...
You're a math teacher. Like half the incoming class is horribly deficient at one part or another of math that was last heavily-covered several years earlier. I'm talking, you're a 7th grade math teacher, and some of these kids aren't able to do long division, plus probably a bunch of other stuff (it's rarely just one thing). This can happen because a single teacher a single year was kinda shit and no-one since has tackled this problem.
You have a choice.
1) The right thing to do is ignore practically everything about what you're supposed to teach them in your grade—not for all the students, but for those with huge gaps in knowledge—and try to fix some of those problems, until all the worst problems are addressed, and only then (and you probably won't have time) try to teach them the new content. They are all but certainly doomed to never truly improve at math if you don't do this.
This will result in those students bombing the standardized tests on which you'll be judged, and on which your career hinges. Good chance they'll do worse than they did the year before. It's also a bunch of extra work because you're coming up with and applying way more lesson plans, activities, assignments, et c. But, they'll in fact be better off.
OR...
2) You can mostly ignore those problems and teach them as much as you can of this year's content. You're a good teacher (else you'd not even consider the first option) so you can do a decent-enough job of getting them to the point they can at least pattern match and guess their way to... well, not success, but something. Yes, their scores will still be bad, but it might mean they get 35% right instead of 15% (if you'd taken the first option), and maybe last year they only got 32% right, so it still looks like you did a good job (the tested content's different each year, so even a small % improvement in scores is good)
Almost nobody chooses the first option because they'd have admin up their ass in a hurry. If they're good and really dedicated they might put in a ton of extra effort and their own time to try to put together supplementary instruction programs of one sort or another. This will likely gain them no extra compensation, and probably involve a whole lot of admin- and politics-induced bullshit. It might even make some enemies. No fun.
Repeat for a few years until the way-above-average teacher burns out and quits to go get paid & treated better in another career, with way less stress.
I confess that even though TED (and similar) talks tend toward vapid, oversimplified self-parody, I sometimes find them enjoyable and even inspiring to watch.
This is such a trope that I seriously got halfway through the article before I realized it wasn't actually just a long set up for a punchline to explain why Gladwell really sucks.
Interesting article.
Maybe they're reading him to learn social engineering, like one reads Mitnick (who is also not good but has produced... interesting... work.)
Also, after reading this perfect parody of Gladwell's writing, I could never take him seriously again: https://themorningnews.org/article/i-dream-in-malcolm-gladwe...
A) people who primarily get their history and philosophy from biographical material about people they admire (or that they have been told about by people they admire.) and
B) people who primarily get their history and philosophy from wide-ranging surveys, and drill deeper when they find information that is interesting or troubling.
It's the difference between people A) who see the world as a bunch of competing narratives, or B) as a bunch of facts (with different probabilities of accuracy) that could support any number of narratives. A) people are looking for the right narratives to sign-on to, and B) people are looking for facts that can exclude entire classes of possible narratives that depend on them.
The major difference is that people who learn about the world from narratives have to be sold. They believe things because someone has drawn them into a narrative around that thing like a prosecuting attorney, and that narrative was smooth enough that it never lost them. Malcolm Gladwell is always selling; he's writing lean, effective ad copy for made-up products - narrative concepts chosen based on market fit, not on their reality.
The market is self-improvement, which is why you could imagine most of his books and articles as advertisements for a new pill. A pill to prevent crime before it happens, a pill to harness your secret internal knowledge when seconds matter (and to ignore your initial impulse when it's most likely to be wrong), a pill to make you successful when other people with your same resources aren't...
I don't want to say your binary is 100% wrong, but I will say it is dangerous to assert that one form of writing ("Just the facts please!") is somehow more divorced from the systems and contexts of its representation than another ("Give me a story!"). It's far more porous than a simple division might make it seem. While your distinction makes people in group A seem like "dupes" and people in group B seem more "level headed", one could just as rightly say that people B might be ignorant of the construction of what they are studying and so succumb in the very same way. It's very easy to see essence in tradition when you ignore the role of people and storytelling in the creation of tradition. There is a reason why the study of history is, in many ways, more like the study of writing and creating history.
He never claimed to be a scientist. And has said many times something like "If the charge against me is being more entertaining than informing then I plead guilty!".
Despite the title and content of the article, the central claim is that "Gladwell is the epitome of the way non-fiction has replaced fiction as a transmission mechanism for important new ideas" which I understand as: a) non-fiction has replaced fiction as an important transmission mechanism for important new ideas, and b) Gladwell is merely incidental to the claim, a mere examplar of the claim.
No effort, however, is put into showing that novels were ever an important way for transmitting new ideas or what important means here. I added "important" because otherwise we are talking about trivialities. Does "important" mean how ideas are first exposed or how they are popularized? I've seen the claim that novels offered an occasion to exercise moral intuitions, but never as any kind of channel for conveying information. Or that that mechanism actually changed from novels to sub-genre non-fiction.
Sure, there's a grand gesture towards comparison between a 19th century novelist and Gladwell. They are both financially successful, Gladwell provides "information" (just like Dickens?), so things must have changed from conveying information from novels to sub-genre non-fiction.
The ensuing article tries not at all to address its central claim which held me with avid interest. I guess the claim served only as pretext and provocation.
There's a reason I own most of its books.
http://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/
Email exchange between Levine and Gladwell:
http://shameproject.com/report/malcolm-gladwell-emails-shame...
Oh, does it ever encourage fluff! Plenty of long form stories posted to HN fit into this category. They begin with a meandering anecdote, build to a surprising or paradoxical end, and only then does the actual story start.
I get bored with this approach when I can't see a connection between the anecdote and the title. A non-fiction title is a promise to the reader. Renege on that promise and the reader is gone like Enron. Long form starts to break the promise when the anecdote gets so shaggy that you forget the title and therefore the reason you're reading the article.
The linked goes on to take apart the syntax Gladwell uses, which is useful to know. But the most important thing Gladwell does AFAICT is to closely align his anecdotes with his controlling idea. That means:
1. Choosing only those anecdotes that optimally align with the controlling idea (theme).
2. For each anecdote, culling stray details that don't align with the controlling idea. This is a painful process for writers, which explains why there are so many shaggy tales told in Big Idea nonfiction.
Or maybe he is just describing what a Hush Puppy shoe is. It's possible the reader does not know what it is. I don't think there is any stylistic significance here. I am certain there are plenty of books that use a similar technique that have not sold nearly as well. Gadwell already had significant name recognition, such as writing for The New Yorker, when the book came out. He got a $1.5 million advance to write the book, and this was before 2000. Obviously he was huge name and the book was expected to sell well.
To me, this reiterates the point. Perhaps he is just describing a Hush Puppy shoe, and it's just the way his mind chooses to present that information.
The same information packaged in other ways won't be as interesting to read, won't feel as compelling, forces the reader to create their own narrative.
Whether this is a subconscious outcome and the words just flow or a carefully calculated outcome with much poring over the sentence structure doesn't much matter.
What matters is that people eat it up, and there is most likely something to learn from that.
I think there's an idea out there that when your faves become (and they always do) Problematic, it's time to defend them with a kind of partisan zeal that approaches the absurd. It's like ok man Gladwell sold a lot of books, no need to create a shadow culture around him.
I of course read alot more Than Gladwell afterwards but I’d never gone as deep if it wasn’t for this book
https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker-archive/should-we-stop-believing...
ChatGPT: actually does it
Isn't Gladwell's crime being too popular? And perhaps honing his style of writing so much that it seems like a pastiche of itself?
I think perhaps some people wanted reading Gladwell-esque pop-intellectual books to mark them out as sophisticated, and that stops working when you realize that everyone has read them. Perhaps Gladwell just personifies that effect.
In a way, performatively declaring Gladwell is a midwit writer is classic midwit behaviour. The next escalation in the opinion arms race is to declare that a sophisticated reading proves Gladwell is actually a genius.