A Concrete Style Is a Better Style

[@NaDa-kw2fu]

From one of the Sanderson lectures: He asked if a 'Dog' was concrete or an abstraction and most said concrete. He pointed out that when they had thought of a dog, it would have been a vastly different form of dog to the person who sat next to them. It really drove the point home for me.

[@I_Love_Learning]

I believe he compared it to love, something which is pretty concrete because love is pretty much the same no matter the circumstances.

[@KyleMaxwell]

I think it’s important to remember that this even applies (and maybe *especially* applies) in concrete fields like technical writing. For example, software engineers, can have a tendency to speak in the abstract when we are discussing specific engineering practices, rather than giving concrete implementation ideas.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Yeah, that's a great point--probably especially where the audience is an end user rather than a fellow engineer

[@KimberlyLetsGo]

Your channel was recommended to me and I'm not sure why. However, not only did I enjoy your lecture but you are one of the most dapper dresser on the entire platform.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Ah, thanks

[@Astraea4674]

I understand "show don't tell" on a whole new level. Thanks so much!!

[@WritingwithAndrew]

You bet!

[@Cleveland_Chris]

This video made lightbulbs turn on for me. Thank you!

[@welcometoeskastudios]

"Oh, look! A happiness!" needs to be on a shirt. 😂

[@Brian-sh5ne]

The final lines of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn have always stuck with me since first reading: "Beauty is truth-truth, beauty-that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The lines are perfect, but very abstract in isolation, and I realized recently that they would be mostly empty if not for Keats' sensory glut in all the preceding lines that create such a vivid experience. An abstract line like that though is so essential to the poem, acting like a bow tying everything together.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Yeah--the sensory is the evidence that makes the abstractions at the end really resonant

[@ranro7371]

"Bandy about enough jargon with enough confidence and the sheer weight of all that abstraction will bully people into thinking you're pretty impressive at least it will at first glance." I'll reuse this sentence. So precisely worded, describing a phenomenon that I noticed with other peoples' reaction, but while somewhat immune to it myself, I had never fully verbalised it. If anything people who use this tactic most often have their premise wrong, their predicate wrong and even the consquent from following the wrong predicate (layered ontop of the wrong premise) is typically also mistaken; Fractally wrong.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

And I'm going to borrow "fractally wrong"--that's really good

[@quagsiremcgee1647]

You could also describe a thing concretely, then it abstractly. If we do just one then I think we lose some info we could otherwise have had. It's probably not always helpful to spend too much space explaining something as well, so maybe we lean on the fact that we probably all atleast have some idea of what a chair looks like instead of describing every small detail without calling it a chair.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

For sure--and concrete descriptions don't have to be lengthy, but the combo is probably the ideal route

[@Void_Dweller7]

Balance is everything in life.

[@AngelTwelveScoop]

This was the most informative lesson i have received on my writing since i was a student. Thank you. Also, youre the non-evil version of Leland Townsend. Have a great day.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Thanks--and I'll take non-evil! 😆

[@judoshrew]

Humor is something that is also relational, it is significantly more work and takes more words to draw somebody to comedy than to be able to work with the relationships people already have with things and pull on those and twist them up through telling into something strong. I think show don't tell has really hurt the concept of comedy as a literary genre. If you read pratchett, he is a really telly author, but he makes it work. Its not that telly is bad, but you have to learn a lot of techniques to make it work. I don't like when people say be "as concrete as possible" because we will lose out on a lot of these techniques if we do.

[@judoshrew]

also, in terms of strengths of medium, telly elements like the influence of prose and introspection are unique qualities to literature that are not prominent in things like television or movies, and so it may be giving up the strengths of the medium to exclusively take on a show don't tell approach.

[@John_Buckson]

Using this in my engineering reports No more generic affirmations Pure information

[@pinecone421]

The video and audio quality of this video is really good. Definitely a great improvement over the years!

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Thanks--learning as we go!

[@delstanley1349]

17:37 "At the top of the mountain, I drank in the vista: the sun glittered in the ripples of the river, gleaned from the windows in town, glowed in the leaves of the orchards. My friend, heaving thin air into tired lungs and shivering in the alpine dawn grimaced and said, "This must be Hell for a vampire!" Thanx for another valuable video on writing.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

You bet!

[@halcyon32]

I think part of why I struggle with this, and why what “abstraction” is is unclear to me occasionally, is due to the storytelling brain in me. It’s a fundamental difference between nonfiction writing, narration, and poems: narration always has an inseparable human component or connection. The specific details said and what is focused on speak something about this human connection, and it’s interpretive. A huge part of learning poetry for me is that poems don’t fundamentally have a person filtering perception. Poems get to make the choice of having a “character” or not. Take a poem from another video: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”. There isn’t a character that is experiencing anything in this poem, but its point and the focus of each word and phrase matters to a different extent. As opposed to something like “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, where the ‘character’ in the poem is part of the poem, how to experience it, and what it says; therein, the verbiage is filtered through this character’s lens. That human connection is the way the poem works. This is a long winded comment admittedly, but I do need to learn how to find this balance and what the balance even is, since much of language is limited in interpreting the world around us. Like the other comment stating we have to count on the audience having an idea of what a “chair” is such to not write every little detail, I think it’s a good exercise for me to gain a sensitivity to the reader in what gaps they have to fill in my writing.

[@dannicholas9267]

Helpful!!

[@rick72035]

Good video, sent it to my writing students.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Nice--thanks!

[@Shireke01]

15:50 Andrew knows what wobbling is, incredible

[@parthasarathidas8202]

Thanks for the tips for better poems

[@FlosBlog]

Object-oriented writing

[@Metadaxe]

"It's a beautiful day," is actually good writing, because it encapsulates the green hills and sparkling dew away from the reader, and exposes only the information necessary for them to follow the narrative.

[@mosttafazahid826]

​@@Metadaxe But definitions of beautiful day can vary based off of where the reader lives and their weather preferences as a whole. For me personally, "beautiful day" draws a blank in my mind and I imagine nothing specific. What I find interesting is that you can reveal a lot about the main character through their perspective of the world, and in this case, their idea of a beautiful day could reveal a lot about their personality if it's a unique idea. So concrete descriptions could benefit the main character's depth, which is why I always like specificity in prose.

[@creativeoj]

A common criticism I hear of concrete writing is that it's inefficient; it's much faster to tell rather than show. And while, yes, there are instances where it's simpler and quicker to just tell the reader what you want to tell them, I'd argue that if you know how to use it, concrete writing can be more efficient. If you say, "She is sad," there's only one way to interpret that: she's sad. But if you say, "she leans her head against the wall and gazes out the window, not looking at--or thinking about--anything in particular," that could mean a lot of things. Sure it might mean she's sad, but it could mean she's depressed, or it could mean she's content, or it could mean she's melancholy (which is somewhere in the middle). The context of the scene will push it in one of those directions, but by leaving how she feels to implication, we can convey more complex and nuanced emotions. Paradoxically, abstract language is pretty rigid, while concrete language is much more flexible. That's part of why it's so effective to end a long thought with an abstraction. You distill the essence of the idea into a rock solid statement, which is all the stronger being backed up by that concrete complexity.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Nice--I like that approach

[@nv_mpala]

This reminds me of E.M. Forster's "Objective Correlative" from Hamlet & His Problems. It also reminds me of Vsevolod Pudovkin's "Plastic Material" from Film Technique. Both talk about the concrete as being stand-ins for any sort of concept/idea/emotion you can think of. ~ps love the work you've been doing here!

[@joshua_tobler]

With regard to the mugging example: we can editorialize by our choices of the details we emphasize and the words we use to emphasize them. Descriptions of the mugger's clothing as unwashed, loose, and dingy, or descriptions of the sterile, cold steel of the gun aimed at the trembling young mother convey all the essential moral content without resorting to dull abstractions. It's the same way we communicate "beauty" without using the word. The concrete suggests the abstract.

[@joshua_tobler]

This is precisely the technique journalists use. They claim objectivity, and their facially "just-the-facts-ma'am" style gives them a patina of objectivity to hide behind. But their perspective still rings through loud and clear.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Yeah, exactly--where Ohmann advocates for abstraction, I'm inclined to think we can get the same effect with more deliberately curated concrete language. (Journalistic ethics, though, are a-whole-nother thing... 😅)

[@joelturnbull9005]

This is the biggest problem with my writing. I’m too concerned with getting across the full scope of my ideas that I lose the audience in abstractions. I’m working on it, but it’s a hard habit to break.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

You're tellin' me 😅

[@xzyeee]

Hummm...although...it may raise a question about what "personal writing development" means. Shouldn't the writer, in striving to be better, work at improving BOTH concrete and abstract writing in appropriate contexts? In fact, can it be argued that pushing to write a bit more abstractly has the added benefit of developing more higher order reading and thinking skills in the writer?

[@michaelanderson2166]

I do not write to make the reader think too much with abstraction. I write to entertain. Any lessons are pure happenstance.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Certainly, and that's part of Ohmann's point--but I've seen many more writers who need to practice working with concrete language than who need to practice abstraction (they've usually got abstractions covered). You'd probably be hard-pressed to find a reader who sais, "If only your work had more abstractions in it"

[@xzyeee]

@@michaelanderson2166 This, of course, being a genre-determined, genre-specific decision.

[@yapdog]

Abstract style is reporting. Concrete style is immersive experience. The art of style is in crafting an arrangement of each in varying amounts for a particular piece.

[@joelturnbull9005]

I have told my students in some contexts to “zoom in and out” by alternating between abstract and concrete.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Nice, I like that way of thinking about it

[@dh-ck2om]

Pat pattison has a songwriting “rule” saying “You can’t tell unless you show first” The abstraction becomes more powerful if preceded by concrete imagery

[@WritingwithAndrew]

I like it!

[@urbosalittlebird8393]

I learnt so much! Thank you

[@WritingwithAndrew]

You bet--that's great!

[@mznxbcv12345]

This is a problem in English. It also tends to give fruit to pseudo-paradoxes (i.e. unmovable object meeting an unstoppable force) from the fact that nonsensical sentences can be grammatically correct in English. A famous phrase " Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is illustrative of that, this is not the case in Arabic however, as Arabic has verbal-nouns rather than verbs and nouns. Hence the phrasing 'unmovable' does not exist, rather it would literally mean "that which is not moving," the word for force would literally mean "that which a person is capable of achieving", rather than have 'force' as an abstraction in of itself. The structure of Arabic grammar would simply not allow for such incoherence to exist as it describes concrete reality, rather than abstractions.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

You gotta love those colorless green ideas! But that's really interesting

[@mznxbcv12345]

Apologies for the bad grammar. Hope it is more clear now, if it weren't before. It was rather late when I wrote this.

[@cemgecgel4284]

I think this divide can be understood as a detailed/summarised spectrum. Then, I will say, important parts should be more detailed.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Definitely--a good way to think about it

[@pinecone421]

Do you have any recommended readings for creative non-fiction writing or creative writing in general for advanced students? I finished my MA in English with a focus on rhetoric and professional writing, so I didn't get too much experience in creative writing, which I'm trying to devote some time to. And I'd like to try to better work at narrativizing data and arguments using creative writing techniques.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

I took a creative nonfiction workshop in grad school, and we worked out of Philip Lopate's anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay. It's mostly a collection of essays, but I also keep coming back to Lopate's discussion of the genre in the introduction. That might be a decent place to start

[@pinecone421]

@ Great thank you!

[@WhatDoesEvilMean]

Every story is just a memory. If it’s not a memory, you probably shouldn’t be telling the story yet. But insofar as a story is just a memory, ask yourself how much time you spend telling someone about the ideas you had when telling them about a memory. The memory, the story *is* the idea.

[@russellcameronthomas2116]

Even "concrete language" is suffused with abstractions via metaphor. See the book "Metaphors We Live By", by Lakoff and Johnson

[@WhatDoesEvilMean]

Note: Your description of love isn’t something that I agree with. You decided to insert an ideological claim into a video about concrete vs abstract writing. Love isn’t that which we do, love is. That’s *my* ideological claim. Perhaps “kindness” would’ve been a better approach. Words like Love and Art and Mind carry with them ideological connotations. Really enjoyed the rest of the video, though. 👍

[@KnowPiracy-zu7il]

This notion of communication as the transfer of ideas from one person to another messed me up for a long time. Communication is more about reconstruction of ideas. Giving people extreme detail doesn't help them understand.

[@valhatan3907]

Does too abstract writimg similar to purple prose? Because when I try to read American YA for the first time as non-native English speaker, it was really confused me. In my defense, I read a book above YA language and target demographic but not as confused as I read them. Turned out it was because of the overuse if purple prose😅

[@WhatDoesEvilMean]

Sidebar: Dialog is always concrete.

[@KrucLeo]

I came in hot, thinking it was a video about programming 😡

[@kenneth1767]

Abstract writing in fiction is just lazy eyes. I recently read that 'he brought her a bunch of flowers' and my picture making mind was wondering what flowers they were. Writers should work hard in bring clarity so that the reader doesn't need to.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

I'm borrowing "lazy eyes"

[@OkAlways-tp7lu]

Descriptive, not prescriptive

[@SirNamer]

I’ve only watched a quarter of the video and I don’t know your channel, but you seem to have completely gone down the path of concrete is good, abstraction is bad. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the two styles. Abstract writing is done with the intention to get across unimportant details and tone of a story. This is a technique by writers to focus the story on elements that are important. Concrete details are to help visualize the scene and attach focus to particular elements. For example, The owner of the store across from the coffee shop, a middle-aged man with a grin complication, scowled at the dog that wandered up to him and waved his hand to shoo away the annoying critter. Maybe, the details of the dog and type of store would assist in visualizing it, but that is not what I want to the reader to be focusing their attention on… I am driving the focus of the scene onto the middle-aged man. Therefore you simply don’t mention the other details as they are not important. At least from the initial impression of your video (about 7 minutes in), you appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of writing techniques and it gives me the initial impression that you barely have any experience with writing. I would warn any new writers to take this person’s advice with a critical eye. Abstraction is a tool to speed up the pace of a story to a readable level, not a sin that should be destroyed. It’s the same terrible advice as show don’t tell. In many situations, you should be telling unimportant details and showing important ones.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

We must not have gotten to Ohmann's argument in the first 7 minutes. There's enough literature drawing on enough methodologies that supports a concrete style that it's worth taking seriously, but there are always asterisks--it wouldn't be writing studies scholarship if there weren't.

[@Miguel-pq9hz]

I personally think the problem is in the readers' side. The skill of abstraction and working in conceptual space is relatively rarer skill in comparison to instantiation and mirroring in imagination space. It follows that if you are a new, pragmatic, commercial writer, it would be safer if we relate to most people rather than a select few. We know that working anything towards accessibility helps everyone, not only the target audience. Even in math writing, the best practice is to accompany your abstract object with an example, counter-example, and a non-example. And if you still to scratch the itch of abstraction, writing few poems might help.

[@FewFew77]

Postmodernists will hate this video,.

[@WritingwithAndrew]

Then the feeling's mutual 😜