REDHUGO Reading 1-1

         Murray and Herrnstein waste no space in diving straight into their points in The Bell Curve. From the first few pages alone, the reader is immediately exposed to a series of historical narratives, statistical jargon, and the politics of psychometrics. Their method for laying the foundation of their argument is perhaps unnecessarily extended, but it nonetheless provides all the relevant context needed to take the whole of society into scope. The first of the book's four parts explains the modern evolution of class in America. Taking into account its trends and consequential impacts, the reader is foreshadowed to significant potential links between the disputed heritability of intelligence and its all-encompassing impacts. By introducing their audience to what is an immediately recognizable and heavily debated staple in American society, Murray and Herrnstein aptly appeal to the reader's assumed contextual background as well as their personal role in the factors in question.
          The nuance to the authors' approach is relatively subtle, yet it still remains significant. Even in the preface and introduction to the book, a reasonable inference can be drawn that the intended audience is not assumed to be one commonly associated with readers of the book. While the authors don't hesitate in throwing relatively advanced content at the reader, they take a slower, methodological approach in introducing such. They use a basic skeleton of first: assuming the reader is aware of any common knowledge relevant to the topic (i.e. the visual trend of correlation), second: further reinforcing the clarity of such relevance, and third: relating new ideas to the current skeleton. Depending on the topic, the authors also use a variety of well-known historical or political entities in order to appeal to the reader's personal knowledge or potential interests. This skeleton is cloned repeatedly throughout the book, thus potentially resulting in a loss of engagement from the reader, but the authors' discussions simultaneously progress in complexity.