A Critical Analysis Of Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of 10,000 hours rule in his best sell book “Outliers”. The idea is that 10,000 hours of appropriately guided practice was “ the magic number of greatness ” regardless of a person’s natural aptitude. With enough practice anyone could achieve a level of proficiency that would rival that of a professional, so it was just a matter of putting in the time to become profession in one field. However, there are many people and articles criticize this theory. The article written by Maia Szalavitz which published in the Time magazine and the article written by Eric Levenson both argue about the 10,000 hour rule by using different opinions, but the one on the Time magazine use more academic and scientific tone to criticize the idea, so this article gives a more rigorous feeling to the reader. The article written by Eric Levenson included a

The first article can gain more reliable feeling by the reader than the second one.

These two articles use different tones to illustrate their ideas. Szalavitz’s article used a more academic and scientific tone to criticize the accuracy of the 10,000 rule. The writer used a lot of different researches, statics and opinions made by many people and organization to show his article is scientifically. “The professor of psychology at Michigan State University” (Szalavitz 1), “the research published in the journal Intelligence” (Szalavitz 1) are the sources that writer used to support his idea, so this give the reader a feeling that this article is really professional because all the resources he used were from big and approbatory organizations by credible people. Furthermore, there are many statics, “Only 30% of …” “34% of people are accounted for…” (Szalavitz 1), used in