Concrete language

Using concepts that can be examined with our senses makes our writing easier to understand

“Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract . . . abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it.”1

Concrete language helps people understand new concepts, so it’s used often by teachers. For example, consider these two scenarios:

A seven-year-old is given ten books and told he has to give three to classmates. Then he’s asked how many books he’s got left. Another seven-year-old is shown, for the first time, 10 – 3 = __.

Which of these will the students find easier? The first one, of course, which is making the mathematical concept of subtraction concrete.

So what does this have to do with writing? Concrete ideas are easier to grasp. One day, I had to describe a child’s difficult behaviour to a colleague. I chose to do it by describing what had actually happened in a certain instance rather than abstractly describing the child’s behaviour in a general fashion. My colleague understood the situation far better after that short story than if I’d used abstract or generalised language.

Another example would be how we present statistics. We can say Japan has less than 1% people who are Christians, or we can show someone a jar containing 99 one-yen coins and a single five-yen coin. For most people, the jar illustration would be easier to understand, as well as be more memorable.

Here’s an example that shows how you can do this in writing:

Japanese people have a tendency to consider the group before they consider themselves. You can see that clearly with the trains: people line up and enter trains in an ordered fashion. Once on the train, they generally refrain from talking on their phones or speaking loudly to their travelling companions.

It isn’t hard to use concrete ideas to illustrate the abstract, but it does require us to take time to think about how we can help our readers see, feel, or experience what we want to communicate. When we’re writing, we need to think about what our readers know and experience, and try to translate what we want to communicate into something concrete that connects with their experience.

1. Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, (London: Arrow Books, 2007), 99–100.

Wendy Marshall is the managing editor of Japan Harvest.

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