Impressive packaging: irony and attitude in a review
Candidates read this extract from a review of the popular-science book 'The Salt of the Earth':
The book arrives with an impressive apparatus: forty pages of notes, a glossary and an endorsement from a television chef. We are told on the first page that the author spent 'the better part of a decade' on it - a claim that the ninety-two items in the bibliography do not entirely support. What the book does offer is enthusiasm, and plenty of it: three chapters on salt as a folk remedy, two paragraphs on the chemistry. Readers who want to know why salt preserves meat will have to look elsewhere.
The question is: Which best describes the reviewer's attitude to the book? A admiring B sceptical but not dismissive C indifferent D hostile.
One student answers D, explaining: 'he calls the apparatus impressive and then says the bibliography doesn't support the claim, and the last sentence tells you to buy a different book.'
1. Establish the correct option and map the textual evidence onto it, sentence by sentence.
Read the worked answer
B - sceptical but not dismissive.
- 'An impressive apparatus' is immediately deflated: notes, a glossary and a celebrity endorsement are presented as packaging rather than substance, and the endorsement is a small joke about authority.
- 'A claim that the ninety-two items in the bibliography do not entirely support' is understatement. The reviewer means the bibliography is thin for a decade's work, but says it in the mildest grammatical form available.
- 'What the book does offer is enthusiasm, and plenty of it' is ironic praise: the colon that follows delivers the bill - three chapters on folk remedies against two paragraphs on chemistry.
- 'Will have to look elsewhere' closes one topic; it does not condemn the book.
Sceptical: every claim of substance is questioned. Not dismissive: enthusiasm is conceded, and the reviewer never says the book is worthless or should not be read.
2. The student chose D (hostile). Explain what distinguishes irony from hostility, and why C (indifferent) also fails.
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The student has confused irony with hostility.
Hostility would need explicit negative evaluation of the book or the author as such: adjectives like 'worthless', 'lazy' or 'misleading', a direct instruction not to buy it, or a personal attack on the author's competence. None of these appears. What appears is understatement - 'do not entirely support' is a polite way of saying 'thin' - and politeness is the opposite of hostility in tone even where the content is critical. Irony says something milder, or warmer, than you mean and lets the reader supply the criticism; hostility states the criticism outright.
The last sentence is also misread: 'will have to look elsewhere' is scoped to one question (why salt preserves meat), not to the whole book. A hostile reviewer would generalise.
'Indifferent' fails for the same reason 'hostile' does: the reviewer has counted the bibliography items and the chapters. That is the behaviour of someone who cares enough to be disappointed; indifference produces no numbers.
3. Rewrite 'What the book does offer is enthusiasm, and plenty of it' in plain, non-ironic English and explain what the rewrite loses.
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Plain version: 'The book is enthusiastic about folk remedies - three chapters - but says very little about the chemistry - two paragraphs.'
What is lost is evaluation without assertion: the original never states 'this is a bad balance'. It puts two quantities in parallel and lets the reader do the arithmetic, and it uses 'what the book does offer', where the emphatic 'does' implies that other expected things are missing without naming them. The rewrite states the judgement openly, which is clearer but no longer funny, and it removes the deniability that lets a reviewer be critical without seeming to attack the author.
That is the pattern to recognise in attitude questions: the reviewer's view often sits in sentence structure - parallelism, colon, emphasis, understatement - rather than in a single evaluative adjective. Scan for those devices before choosing between 'sceptical' and 'hostile'.