The Unitasker


The author uses Huxley’s three directions in how to write a successful essay.  The author moves toward the personal and inner experience really well in this chapter.  The entire chapter was written in first person and vividly describes all the experiences that the author went through to try out his project or experiment.  The project was to focus on not multitasking.  We humans are so prone to multitask.  The author proves how unhealthy it actually is in this chapter by using evidence he gathers from books.  In the end of the chapter, the author fails at the unitasker but the effort was there and at least he tried out his project.

The author moves toward the objective and factual as Huxley’s second direction in how to write a successful essay.  The author uses facts stated from books to help prove some points that he makes.  The author also uses headings which was very helpful because then I knew what the next few paragraphs was going to be about which contributed to the success of this entire chapter.  The author uses the book called, “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age” written by Maggie Jackson to talk about the culture of distraction and his thoughts on it.

A successful essay needs to move toward the abstract, the poetic, the universal as the third direction from Huxley.  The author of this chapter does that by moving toward the abstract.  An abstract is a brief summary of a paper or article, which the author does not exactly use in this chapter.  However, the author makes it very clear what the chapter is going to be about by stating it early and then using personal experiences to back up the entire point, which is that unitasking is very difficult.  The author lays out the project or experiment in steps.  He uses headings such as, “The Preparation,” “Just Sit,” and “Extreme Focus” as just some examples to show how the author is moving toward being poetic and universal.  To conclude, the author somewhat succeeded in not multitasking for a short period, but really learned a lot from the experience which is all positive.


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