The Matthew Effect looks at Canadian hockey players and how the overwhelming majority of these players are born from January to March. The cutoff date determining what division the child can play is in January 1st, so those children born early in the year are older, and more mature, and this gives them an advantage at the beginner level. This book is called; Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. In his book, Gladwell tries to explain how these kids are starting to get funneled into more elite programs, the child born in January, who is older, bigger, and more mature, will get selected. For my analysis of The Matthew Effect, Gladwell uses figurative language such as imagery, rhetorical question, and exemplification.
“The air was filled with cigar smoke and the smell of champagne and sweat-soaked hockey gear.” In this quote, Gladwell uses imagery to describe the smell and tension into the winning team’s locker room. The smell of champagne and sweat-soaked hockey gear filled the locker room with the excitement and the cheers of the winning team. Cigar smoke came from the winning teams families and sports reporters that came from across the country to celebrate the winning team’s success. The reader can literally visualize the after math of the game in the locker room.
Gladwell closes the first section of the chapter with a rhetorical question. A rhetorical question is when the author asks a question but doesn’t answer it. “Players are judged on their own performance, not on anyone else's, and on the basis of their ability, not on some other arbitrary fact. Or are they?” In this quote Gladwell is describing a real player chosen by their performance and their ability. He ends the quote by asking, are the hockey players chosen based on individual merit.
The last paragraph of section one of the chapter, Gladwell begins to use exemplification to describe success. “Biologists often talk about the "ecology" of an organism: the tallest