[End of Sentence is my weekly newsletter about nonfiction crime writing.]
This week we’re going to talk some more about Malcolm Gladwell. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Gladwell’s also written a number of popular books. He’s written a fair amount about crime, criminal justice, and related issues, both in the New Yorker and in his books.
Last week, we looked in some depth at the structure of Thresholds of Violence, a New Yorker piece about school shootings and how they “catch on.”
This week, we’re going to look at some of the nuts and bolts that hold the piece together: section transitions.
The first word of the major sections of this New Yorker article begin with an extra-large capital letter (two-lines tall) called a “drop cap.” There’s also a bit of extra white space before the section begins.
These design elements help transition between one section and the next, giving the reader a subtle sign that what comes next will be different from what they’ve just been reading.
Here are the first sentences of the six major sections of Thresholds:
- “On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca, a woman was doing the dishes when she looked out her kitchen window and saw a young man walking through her back yard.”
- “On February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, a forteen-year-old named Barry Loukaitis walked into Frontier Middle School dressed in a black duster and carrying two handguns, seventy-eight rounds of ammunition, and a hunting rifle.”
- “In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: ‘situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.'”
- “The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic.”
- “John LaDue was charged with four counts of attempted murder, two counts of damage to property, and six counts of possession of explosives.”
- “The John LaDue case took a final turn last month.”
The first sentences in the first two sections have a lot to do. The first section starts the central narrative of the article, while the second digresses from that narrative to discuss the history of school shootings before returning to the central narrative. Both sections begin with sentences that establish the when, where, who, and what as soon as possible.
The third of the above section-starting sentences also sets the scene for its section, in this case making it clear from the fourth word (“essay”) that we’re in for something more abstract than the previous two sections. This is fitting since this section is where we encounter the “big idea” (it is a Malcolm Gladwell piece, remember) of the article:
“But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?”
Armed with the “big idea”, the theory, Gladwell goes back in the fourth section to test it against the history of school shootings he’s already recounted, which is what the first sentence of the section (“The first seven major shooting cases…”) sets us up to do.
Gladwell returns to LaDue and discusses how the theory applies to him in second last paragraph of the section:
“Now imagine that the riot takes a big step further along the progression—to someone with an even higher threshold, for whom the group identification and immersion in the culture of school shooting are even more dominant considerations. That’s John LaDue.”
The section ends with quotes from LaDue’s police interview that support this position in the riot progression.
The fifth section sees a return to the central narrative (“John LaDue was charged with…”), which is continued and concluded in the sixth and final section (“The John LaDue case took a final turn…”).
With Thresholds, Gladwell took a bloodless chapter in the unfolding story of school shootings (Police discovered LaDue’s plans before he had a chance to carry them out), then used it to look for the shapes underlying the previous chapters in a way that offered new understanding of those chapters.
That’s a lot of ground to cover, and without the section transitions acting as signposts, readers could have easily gotten lost along the way.
Next week, we’ll finish with Gladwell by looking at some of his own thoughts on how he uses social theory like he did here in Thresholds.