Why do book clubs love Malcolm Gladwell? He reads deeply and writes clearly, in plain English

Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell reads deeply and writes clearly. A.P. photo.

When book clubs read non-fiction, they are generally clever enough to choose books that raise provocative questions, a preference that often leads them to author Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker columnist and best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Why does Gladwell get so much book club love? He reads deeply and writes clearly to tell a story in plain English.

For all three of his books, Gladwell began by reading voluminous, complicated, scholarly research on a topic he found interesting. He interpreted what all that research added up to and summarized it simply, with lots of examples. Author David Leonhardt suggests that this gift comes to Gladwell as a result of his family history:

His mother was a psychotherapist and his father a mathematician. Their professions pointed young Malcolm toward the behavioral sciences, whose popularity would explode in the 1990s. His mother also just happened to be a writer on the side. So unlike most children of mathematicians and therapists, he came to learn, as he would later recall, ‘that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply.’

You can see how this talent plays out by comparing Gladwell’s writing to that of K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer, the scholars whose study Gladwell summarizes in Outliers. Here is how they put it:

In this article we propose a theoretical framework that explains expert performance in terms of acquired characteristics resulting from extended deliberate practice and that limits the role of innate (inherited) characteristics to general levels of activity and emotionality… Our review has also shown that the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve. Hence, stable levels of performance after extended experience are not rigidly limited by unmodifiable, possibly innate, factors, but can be further increased by deliberate efforts. We have shown that expert performance is acquired slowly over a very long time as a result of practice and that the highest levels of performance and achievement appear to require at least around 10 years of intense prior preparation.

This is a fascinating topic, written in a confusing way, by brilliant researchers who are limited by their complex, jargon-filled language to reaching an audience of other experts. When Gladwell explains their ideas to his non-expert readers, it sounds like this:

Ericsson and his colleagues … compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours. The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

While Ericsson and his partners do the data-gathering and interpretation, Gladwell puts all that work into a new, clear and direct form that typical, non-expert readers can actually understand. He puts it into plain English.

Gladwell tells stories, clearly and directly, with lots of examples. Look carefully at the work of other best-selling non-fiction writers like Thomas Friedman and Oliver Sacks and you will find the same thing: deep-reading, clear phrasing and lots of stories. It should be no surprise that book clubs everywhere flock to this work. It’s only surprising that more writers don’t try the same tactic.

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