Rhetorical Analysis Of Outliers Gladwell

In Outliers: The Story of Success, introductory facts are presented in the epilogue, where Gladwell explains to the reader about his family’s heritage. He states how his grandmother, Daisy Nation, was able to provide for and raise her two daughters in Jamaica during the early 1900s. His own family legacy is credible because it shows that he knows how success works, and how it helped his family move through life rather easily. This was all because his grandmother “was the inheritor of a legacy of privilege” (pg. 280), which is one of the main points that Gladwell brings up in his argument. The fact that his relatives lived through this experience is also his relationship to the topic. He presents ethos by comparing many different types of viewpoints, …show more content…
Gladwell’s tone is informative and serious, there are rarely any jokes throughout his writing. His writing is also casual, as if he is physically speaking to the reader. He forms his sentences clearly to evade confusion, but also uses words like “we” and “our”. There is a slight shift of tone in the epilogue, where he first starts talking about his grandmother. His tone becomes very casual, as if he’s saying “oh it’s nothing”, but once he reveals who Daisy Nation truly is he switches back to his serious tone. Gladwell states his feelings on the topic of success directly in the ninth chapter, where he states that “to build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success… with a society that provides opportunities for all.” (pg. 268) He obviously wants the system to change so that others can have a chance at success. Gladwell believes that “the world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.” (pg. 268) He feels as though the world has so much unlocked potential, yet we are wasting everyone’s talents by giving only select few fame and glory through a corrupted and biased …show more content…
It is also a chance for him to write about his family legacy in the epilogue, whether or not that was his original motivation. Social issues that are presented in the story include how society has been shaped by success, but also how success has been shaped by society. Society romanticizes and idealizes success since there are few successful people. However, those who are fortunate are only fortunate because of the system that society has chosen to go with. This includes how come the most prestigious hockey players are born right after the cut-off date, because “he gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a season” (pg. 24). This is only one of the examples of how flawed the classification of successful people are. However, social issues have arisen because of lack of success as well. For instance, in chapter seven, it is implied that Korean Air was the worst airline in the world, with a loss rate of “4.79 million departures”, which “more than seventeen times higher” than United Airlines, at .27 million departures (pg. 180). Because of such a horrible rate and frequent disasters, “Korean Air turned itself around” (pg. 182) and began working on its employees and training. He explains how Koreans were trained to forget about their culture in flight training, and how to be