Rhetoric:
Gladwell uses creative syntax to convey his idea of success. Through the use of syntax, he helps the reader fully develop the concept of an event he is explaning. An example of this is when a child went to a doctor's office and asked the doctor any amount of questions because his mother told him to. When the doctor was talking to the mother about how the son was "in the ninety-fifth percentile in height", the child spoke up and asked, "I'm in the what?" Instead of stating what happened with vague details, Gladwell actually changes the syntax in a way where you can visualize the conversation between the child and the doctor. There were no quotation marks, and the print became smaller, and it was just a conversation between the child and the doctor. This made the event come to life and to understand better why the mother wanted her son to ask the doctor questions. Another different use of syntax was when Gladwell put a real intelligence test in the book for the reader to be interactive and to get a closer look at what the smart outliers can do. It was a "Raven's test" that doesn't "require no language skills or specific body of acquired knowledge" but it a "measure of abstract reasoning skills". And after the reader looks over the quiz, he gives the answer and confesses that he himself didn't quite know the answer. Asterisks were uses a lot throughtout the book to further explain a word or sentence that people may not know. When Gladwell asked the question, "Why are manhole covers round?" he says that if you didn't know the answer to this question, you "aren't smart enough to work for Microsoft" with an asterisk at the end. The answer to that question then was on the bottom of the page next to the asterisk. It was, "that a round manhole cover can't fall into the manhole, while a rectangular cover can". Gladwell's creative syntax makes learning about success fun and easier for the reader.