Stop Explaining. Start Showing.
By Rita Okonkwo · The Craft
Two versions of the same point:
"Effective onboarding significantly improves employee retention through early relationship-building."
"On her first morning, nobody knew Priya was starting. She sat in reception for forty minutes. She left in March."
Both say the same thing. One of them you will still remember tomorrow.
Why abstraction feels safer
Speakers reach for abstraction because it feels rigorous and it feels safe. A general statement cannot be argued with in the specifics, because it has no specifics.
That safety has a cost. Abstract language gives an audience nothing to do. There is no image to build, nobody to care about, no scene to enter. The words pass through.
Concrete language is riskier (someone might say "that is one anecdote"), and it is the kind of language people actually keep.
There is a second reason experts drift upwards. The more you know about a subject, the more natural its general terms feel, and the harder it is to remember that your listener has no examples behind them. That is the curse of knowledge, and abstraction is one of its most common symptoms.
What the research says
The advantage of concrete language has been measured. In a set of studies published in 1993, Mark Sadoski, Ernest Goetz and Joyce Fritz had students read short passages that varied in how concrete they were, rate them, and later recall them.1 Concreteness was one of the strongest predictors of how easy a passage was judged to understand and of how much of it people remembered. The authors read this as support for dual coding theory: a concrete word can be stored both as a word and as a picture, so it has two routes back into memory where an abstract word has one.
That work was done with reading, where people can go back over a sentence. A listener cannot, which is a reason to think concreteness matters at least as much in a talk, though the study did not test speech.
Chip and Dan Heath reached the same place from the practical side. In Made to Stick, their book on why some ideas survive and others do not, being concrete is one of the six principles they name.2
The ladder
Every idea can be said at several levels of abstraction. Picture a ladder:
- Principle: "psychological safety improves team performance"
- Pattern: "teams where junior people ask questions catch problems earlier"
- Instance: "the intern who asked why the numbers looked odd on a Tuesday, three weeks before the audit"
Most speakers live on rung one and occasionally visit rung two. The talks people remember spend most of their time on rung three and climb up to rung one once, at the end, having earned it.
The move is not to abandon principles. It is to arrive at them.
Three ways down the ladder
Name a person. Say a user rather than "users", and the client who rang at 4pm on a Friday rather than "a client". A name gives the audience someone to track.
Use a real number, not a rounded one. "Roughly a third" is forgettable. "Nineteen of the fifty-two" sounds like something you counted, because it is.
Put it in a place and a time. "In a meeting" is nowhere. "In the Tuesday standup, at the point where we were meant to be wrapping up" is a room your audience can sit in.
A worked example
Say you are asking your manager for budget for a shared support inbox tool. A first draft might read:
"Our current process creates inefficiencies and customer experience risk. A dedicated tool would improve response times and accountability."
Every word of that is defensible, and none of it gives your manager anything to picture. Here is the same case brought down the ladder:
"Last Thursday a customer emailed us twice about a failed payment. Two of us replied, with different answers, forty minutes apart. Nobody could see the other reply. That happens because our inbox is a shared password and a spreadsheet. A tool where each email has one owner would have caught it."
The second version contains the principle (accountability, response times) but arrives at it through one event. The manager can now repeat the story to their own manager, which is often what the request actually needs.
One condition matters here: the event has to be real. If you do not have a true example, find one before the meeting rather than inventing one. Made-up specifics are the fastest way to lose a room that later checks.
Common mistakes
The hypothetical stand-in. "Imagine a customer who is frustrated" is still rung one wearing a costume. A real customer on a real day is rung three.
Too many instances. One vivid example per point is plenty. Five in a row turn into a list, and the audience stops building pictures.
Detail that does no work. Concrete does not mean exhaustive. Keep the details that carry the point (forty minutes, two different answers) and drop the ones that only add length.
Never climbing back up. A talk made only of stories leaves the audience to guess what they were for. Say the principle once, clearly, after the example has earned it.
The revision pass
Once your talk is drafted, read it back with one question at every paragraph: could someone film this?
If the answer is no, and there is nothing to point a camera at, that paragraph is on rung one. Either bring it down, or cut it and let a neighbouring concrete passage carry the point.
You will usually find your talk is more abstract than you thought, and that the concrete parts are the ones you were nervous about because they felt too small. Those are the parts the audience will quote back to you.
A ten-minute drill
Pick one claim you make often at work. Write it as a principle in one sentence. Then write the pattern underneath it, and then one true instance with a name, a number and a place. Say all three out loud, in reverse order: instance, pattern, principle. Time how long the instance takes. If it runs past thirty seconds, cut details until it fits, keeping the ones a camera could see.
References
- Sadoski, M., Goetz, E. T., & Fritz, J. B. (1993). Impact of concreteness on comprehensibility, interest, and memory for text: Implications for dual coding theory and text design. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(2), 291–304. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.85.2.291
- Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Random House. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8423528W