The Daily Beast has a wonderful series in which they ask successful and influential writers, in a terrific interview format, to reflect on:  How I Write.  The latest author featured is Susan Cain, author of Quiet.  The entire article, Susan Cain: How I Write, is worth reading, but I especially like this section:

What are your thoughts on the Malcolm Gladwell-ification of science writing?


I love Gladwell’s books, and the genre he created, and am annoyed by how fashionable it’s become to criticize him for being slick and not a “real” intellectual. I think that writers like Gladwell perform a service precisely because they’re not academics. They’re not too close to the research, so it’s easier for them to appreciate how fascinating it is.

When I started researching Quiet, I found so much amazing stuff that’s second nature to personality psychologists but utterly unknown to laypeople. (Did you know that introverts, who are more sensitive to stimuli than extroverts, will salivate more if you pour lemon juice on their tongues?) Academics, who’ve been studying this stuff since graduate school, can’t always see how remarkable it is. In fact, the more immersed I became in my subject, the more it started to seem like second nature to me, too. I had to go back and remember how awestruck I felt when I encountered it for the first time.

I do think there’s a tendency in the last five or 10 years for writers to use neuroscience in a reductive way, as if that’s the only or best way to understand human nature. And there’s a temptation to act as if we know more about the brain than we really do. But people are already starting to self-correct on this. So I think we’ll be OK.

That is an elegant and thorough way to say this:  when there is important information, or an important idea, someone has to communicate it clearly, simply, making it genuinely accessible to the “rest of us.”  Frequently, the absolutely necessary academic researchers are either too close to the details, or maybe simply not gifted as clear simple writers.

I’m a lot of years removed from a daily reading of academic journals, and probably never did study any subject as thoroughly as those who would seek to know the impact of lemon juice on the tongue of an introvert contrasted with that of the extrovert.  But Gladwell provides the model, according to Ms. Cain, for how to translate such specific findings into understandable, accessible, narratives. And I would add that her own book, Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking does a very good job at carrying on in the Gladwell tradition.

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I have presented a synopsis of Quiet at the First Friday Book Synopsis, as well as three of Malcolm Gladwell’s books:  The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.  These are available, with handouts + the audio of my presentations, at our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.