Give Abstraction a Body

Some prose stacks its nouns from the upper floors, “resilience,” “systemic inequity,” “narrative tension,” “engagement,” with nothing at ground level. Argument, theory and analysis need abstraction, and so do poems about time, and the answer is not sensory adjectives or more description. Each abstraction needs somewhere to stand, such as a case, an object, a number or an act that someone could see happen, so the reader can check the claim against something.

In the second chapter of Hard Times, Mr. Gradgrind asks a pupil he calls “girl number twenty” to define a horse. She is Sissy Jupe, whose father “belongs to the horse-riding,” and she knows horses intimately, but the demand throws her “into the greatest alarm.” So Gradgrind turns to a boy, Bitzer, who answers in one breath: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth,” and on through shedding and shoeing. The definition is accurate, and nothing in it lets a reader see, hear or smell a horse. Dickens is satirizing a theory of education and gives no advice to essayists, but Bitzer has abstraction without a body and Sissy has the animal with no handle to lift it by. Writing that explains needs both, and in our reading much of it errs on Bitzer’s side.

A reader seems to connect an abstract claim to their own memory only when the writer offers something to connect to. An instance also tests the claim. If you cannot find a single concrete case of what you are asserting, the assertion may be empty, and if the case you find contradicts it, you have learned something before a reader has.

Concreteness can bury an argument too. An essay with an anecdote under every point begins to read as a string of anecdotes, and a vivid case can mislead, since its force comes from its vividness, which says nothing about whether it is typical. For claims about frequency or cause, a case illustrates and does not prove, which is a problem for the research chapters (Practice 72). Choose the instance that is representative, not merely striking, and say what it is an instance of.

Practice. Take a chapter or essay of your own, up to two thousand words. List its major abstractions, the words you would put in a summary: freedom, grief, efficiency, risk. For each, write one concrete manifestation, something a stranger could see or check: a thing someone does, an object, a number, a moment. Ask whether the instance is already in the text. If not, place it next to the abstraction. If the instance does all the work, consider cutting the abstraction. Do at least three. Thirty minutes.