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I once published an 1,800-word blog post with 14 examples and watched reading time drop—because an example is a bridge, and you only build a bridge when there's an actual chasm.
For years, I made two distinct mistakes in sequence. First, I wrote sentences like "quality content strengthens your brand" and left them completely unsupported; nobody paused, nobody remembered. Then, in a workshop, I learned that "concrete examples are always better," and swung violently to the opposite extreme: I attached an example to every single paragraph. Once, upon reopening an 1,800-word blog post, I realized I had crammed 14 separate examples into it. The piece dragged, its pace died, and my editor left a single margin note: "Alright, we get it."
The problem wasn't the presence or absence of examples. The problem was not knowing under which conditions an example is mandatory, and under which conditions it is dead weight. This article breaks down the decision matrix I developed over the years between those two extremes—complete with before-and-after revision pairs and my own failed experiments.
The quickest way to tell whether a sentence is abstract in five seconds comes from a tool I adapted from Roy Peter Clark's book Writing Tools: climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction. The concept of the ladder itself belongs to S.I. Hayakawa—principles and broad claims sit at the top, while sensory details rest at the bottom. Here is my everyday version:
Could I capture this sentence with a camera?
"Quality content strengthens your brand"—what does the lens record? Nothing. Abstract. "The support team turned a customer ticket into a blog post"—there is a person, a screen, an observable action. Concrete.
To be completely honest, I made another mistake here for years: I assumed the camera test was the sole criterion. You cannot snap a photo of "conversion rate increased from 2% to 3.4%," yet that sentence is not abstract—it is verifiable. So I expanded the test: Can it be visualized OR counted/verified? If either answer is yes, the sentence is concrete. If both are no, you are standing at the top of the ladder, and your reader is staring into a vacuum.
This test is grounded in cognitive science. According to Allan Paivio's dual coding theory, concrete words are encoded in both verbal and nonverbal (imagery) systems, whereas abstract words remain primarily in the verbal system. The "concreteness effect"—the consistent finding that concrete statements are remembered better—compiled by Mark Sadoski and Paivio in Imagery and Text, is well-documented across dozens of experiments. An example isn't decorative fluff; it is a bridge that opens the mental imagery channel. Let me add a note of candor, though: this research literature focuses on recall at the word and short-passage level. Saying "adding an example to a blog paragraph boosts comprehension" is a reasonable hypothesis derived from the theory, not a direct laboratory finding. I have watched that hypothesis hold up in my own content metrics, but I will not pitch it as "proven by science."
And here is the critical corollary of the bridge metaphor: you only need a bridge when there is a chasm. If a sentence already contains an observable action or a verifiable number, the mental image is already formed; stacking a second scene on top carries zero new information and merely inflates the word count.
The decision hinges on two questions:
Two axes, four quadrants. Let's break them down.
The clearest quadrant of all. The sentence cannot be verified, and the reader has no existing mental schema to attach it to. A bridge is non-negotiable.
Before: "Quality content matters. The right content strategy brings long-term value to your brand."
After: "The support team turned a question received via customer email into a blog post; three months later, it was the highest-traffic page on the website."
I wrote the first version for years. When I switched to the second, I watched time-on-page metrics rise noticeably in analytics. The difference comes down to what the Heath brothers call the "Velcro theory of memory": memory sticks to multiple sensory hooks, not a single abstraction. "Brings value" offers zero hooks; "support team, email, blog post, three months, highest-traffic" offers five.
This is where I made my first major blunder. In the fourth email of a sequence—after the reader had already encountered and bought into the core premise for three installments—I tried to prove the same claim yet again with an example. A fresh case study, a new scene, two full paragraphs. A subscriber replied with exact words: "Okay, we get it, but how do we actually do it?"
A convinced reader does not want a bridge; they want to know what to do once they reach the other side. In this quadrant, direct instructions work far better than examples:
Before: "Customer questions are invaluable as content ideas. For instance, a SaaS company... [two paragraphs of case study]"
After: "Open your support inbox, list the questions that came up more than twice in the past 30 days, and turn each one into an article headline."
A key nuance: Nielsen Norman Group's research on plain language demonstrates that expert readers also prefer clear, concrete phrasing. This does not mean you have a license to write in vague abstractions just because the reader is already convinced. The instruction itself must still pass the camera test—"optimize your workflow" is not an instruction; "open your support inbox" is.
My most instructive counterexample belongs right here. In a case study, I wrote: "The team trimmed the onboarding email down to three sentences, and the reply rate doubled." The sentence already contained both numbers and action—it cleared both the camera and verifiability tests. But because I was stuck in my "examples are always good" phase, I added a second scene underneath: another company's similar editing story, spanning four more sentences.
The result: the section grew by roughly a third, adding zero value. The second scene carried no new insight; adding a second proof point to the same claim yields diminishing returns and introduces bloat. Well-established findings from the Nielsen Norman Group apply here: Jakob Nielsen's 1997 study "How Users Read on the Web" showed that people scan web pages rather than reading word-for-word, and their 2006 eye-tracking research documented the ubiquitous F-shaped scanning pattern. These are older but repeatedly validated findings—and on a scannable page, an unnecessary example simply slows the reader down from finding what they need. I am not aware of any published study declaring "surplus examples lower completion rates by X%"; I won't invent figures I can't back up. But you can easily measure this in your own work: compare scroll depth and average time on page across versions with and without redundant examples.
The hardest editorial discipline. The examples in this category are usually well-written—the issue isn't their quality, but their redundancy. Last year, while drafting a framework article, I cut a scene I genuinely loved because the sentence already contained concrete figures and the audience was already well-versed in the topic. It pained me for two days, but the final piece was indisputably sharper. The courage to cut an example you love takes much longer to develop than the skill of writing one—in my case, it took at least five years.
We also need to clarify what "adding an example" actually means, because not every descriptive sentence constitutes a scene. A functional, concrete scene requires three baseline components:
If any of these three is missing, the scene remains abstract. Writing "a company grew through content marketing" is just an assertion masquerading as an example—I deceived myself with these pseudo-scenes for years.
Let me add one more trap here, because it was the one I fell into the longest: substituting a metaphor for an example. "Content is like a garden; you plant seeds, water them, and harvest fruit over time." For a period, I opened almost every article with a metaphor like that, believing I was making things concrete. But a metaphor lacks both the second and third components of a true scene: there is no observable action in the real world, and no verifiable result. Worse, a metaphor demands an extra layer of cognitive translation—the reader has to decode the garden first, then map it back onto content strategy. Steven Pinker's classic style ideal in The Sense of Style argues the exact opposite: the writer's job is to direct the reader's gaze toward something concrete in the world; idioms like "digital transformation journey" or "delivering value" obscure that view. A fair caveat: a good metaphor can occasionally enable schema transfer—such as the definition cited by the Heath brothers, "a pomelo is a giant grapefruit," which serves as a far more economical bridge than a full scene. Metaphors aren't forbidden; they simply do not count as proof. A scene is proof; a metaphor is, at best, a shortcut.
Whenever I have two or three competing candidate examples for the same abstract claim, I filter them using this sequence:
To be clear, this matrix and these criteria represent an editorial framework I synthesized from the work of Heath, Pinker, and Clark—none of their books contain this exact table, and I will not attribute it to them directly. Think of it as the non-fiction translation of the classic fiction consensus: "'Show, don't tell' has its limits; dramatizing every single sentence destroys narrative momentum." One scene per claim; one claim per scene.
If I had to compress this entire matrix into one actionable directive:
Before publishing, run the camera test on the opening sentence of every paragraph; if it cannot be photographed, either add a single scene or rewrite the sentence to make it observable—never do both.
Doing both was the exact flaw in my 14-example post: making a sentence concrete and then dropping a scene beneath it is building the exact same bridge twice. If there is a chasm, one bridge is enough. If there is no chasm, building a bridge is just an unnecessary detour.