Faisal Rahman

English 1121, E106

Genre analysis: “dumbed down books”

The genre I chose to write in does not have a definite name. but if were to explain it, it is a culmination of sophisticated ideas and theories explained in a “dumbed down” way without going into technical details. The beauty of this genre is that it tells us as much as we need to understand -without going into broad details-, say a scientific theory, that most people without prior experience with the topic won’t understand. An example of a book from this genre is called, “What is Relativity”- by Jeffrey Bennet. This book contains all the important ideas about relativity without being very technical. The audience of this genre/book are people that are interested in astronomy, but, are new to the topic.

 

The world is a very complex dimension created by some unknown entity. From astronomical objects such as the planets, stars, blackholes, nebulae, to atomic objects that includes protons, electrons, neutrons and others, there exist a lot of physical and intangible phenomenon. From the philosophical ideas of humanities to the laws of physics, there are a lot of sophisticated explanation as to why we exist and how we exist in this world. For the masses it can be challenging, and sometimes extremely hard, to grasp a hold of the ideas and proven laws about the world. If we go into specifics, astronomy for example is a realm of science that is often stereotyped as a subject for the “nerds”. Though it is true that some of the concepts of astronomy, is hard to understand, we should still know how our world at large operates.

The advanced books that explains these hard to understand phenomenon and ideas are too hard and monotonous for the novice reader.  A genre was created for this very reason keeping the masses in mind. This genre of books generally contains all the concepts of a specific topic, but only explained in an easier way. In this regard, this genre is different from those genres that only contains the basics. The books of this genre have a lot of easy to understand examples. I have noticed that it is much easier to understand something when you can relate it to something else that you have already experienced or know about. These books also contain less to no complicated mathematical proofs to prove a law or theory. When mathematical applications are absolutely needed to explain something, the author generally tells that to the reader and suggests them to read a more advanced book if they want to further their knowledge on the subject. without much technical details, these books generally lack concrete evidence to back up what the author is trying to convey.