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You can't film "quality content is important" on camera—and nobody stops for a sentence they can't visualize. But add a scene to every line, and your copy suffocates. An example is medication; it has a dosage.
I have a blog post from 2019 in front of me. My own writing. The topic is content strategy, the length is twelve hundred words, and it contains lines like: "Producing quality content is of paramount importance for brands." "Improving the user experience must not be overlooked." "Analyzing target audiences accurately is the key to success."
Back then, I mistook these sentences for arguments. They sounded serious, corporate, and "professional." Then one day, I checked the heat map for that post: most readers left before even scrolling past the first screen. Nobody stopped, because there was nothing to stop for. In none of those sentences was anyone actually doing anything. There was no scene, no actor, no moment. Just abstract concepts assigning value to one another.
This article is an account of a craft practice that has accumulated on my editing desk ever since: micro-edits that turn an abstract claim into a single, concrete scene. But let me be clear up front—this is not a sermon urging you to "make every sentence concrete." I preached that to myself, followed it strictly, and watched my copy bloat and sink. An example is medication; it has a proper dosage and specific conditions. The craft lies in diagnosing which sentence actually deserves the cure.
When you dissect the three sentences above, a shared anatomy emerges. At editorial speed—meaning without pondering each sentence for thirty seconds—three signals reveal abstraction:
Signal one: the subject is a concept, or even a nominalized verb. "The improvement of user experience," "the analysis of target audiences"—these are the cousins of what Helen Sword famously termed "zombie nouns" in The New York Times. Sword's observation is clear: when verbs and adjectives are turned into nouns, the sentence loses its actor and its action. In Turkish, these zombies proliferate through long noun-phrase chains; in English, they emerge through suffix bloat (-tion, -ment, -ance). Nobody is doing anything; concepts are simply optimizing each other.
Signal two: the predicate belongs to the "importance" family. Is important, is critical, is required, must not be overlooked, plays a crucial role. Present tense plus modality: valid always, for everyone, under every imaginable condition without exception. This predicate family severs the sentence from time and place.
Signal three: the agent is missing. Passive constructions ("must be ensured," "should not be neglected") erase the actor completely. You cannot even ask who did what, because nobody is in the frame.
Here is a simple field test: can you capture the sentence on camera? You cannot film "Quality content is important"—what is the lens supposed to focus on? If you can't film it, the sentence is abstract. That doesn't automatically make it bad; it just means it has no scene. When lack of scenery becomes a liability is another question—one I will address shortly.
Turning an abstract sentence into a scene takes three moves at my desk. Let me show each move with a before/after pair.
Move 1 — Reduce the concept to a person and a moment.
Before: "Quality content is important." After: "If a reader puts their phone down at the third paragraph and starts taking notes, that content is high quality."
In the first sentence, the subject is an abstraction ("quality content"); in the second, there is a human and a moment. The camera finally has something to focus on: the desk, the phone, the notepad. Notice that the underlying claim hasn't changed—it has merely taken on flesh and bone.
Move 2 — Replace the value judgment with observable behavior.
Before: "A headline must pique curiosity." After: "A good headline is one the reader cannot close while their browser tab is open—if they do close it, it lingers in their head until they come back."
"Must pique curiosity" is a value judgment; you can't measure it, and you can't challenge it, because it says nothing concrete. "Inability to close the tab" is an observable behavior; the reader has experienced this in their own browser and can weigh the claim against their own reality.
Move 3 — Anchor the universal tense to a single event.
Before: "Long paragraphs fatigue the reader." After: "Last month, I split an eleven-line paragraph into two on a draft; I didn't touch anything else. On the editor's return, that section received feedback for the first time—turns out everyone had been skipping it."
The habitual present ("fatigues") makes the claim valid everywhere and nowhere. A single event ("last month, on one draft") anchors the claim to a falsifiable point in reality.
The common formula across all three moves: convert nominalizations back into active verbs, flip passive voice to active, and put a person into the sentence. "Strengthening communication should be prioritized" → "The editor gives the writer a five-minute call after the first draft."
Now for the embarrassing part. For six months after discovering these mechanics, I slapped an example onto every abstract sentence I laid eyes on. A scene for every claim, a detail for every scene. I recall a client blog post: the initial draft was 900 words; my "concretized" version ballooned to 1,900 words. Every paragraph was individually better. The piece as a whole was worse.
Research on web reading from Nielsen Norman Group helped me understand why it failed. Jakob Nielsen's 2008 analysis, "How Little Do Users Read?", found that users read only about 20–28% of the text on an average web page, and as word count climbs, the percentage read drops. NN/g's eye-tracking studies (the F-shaped scanning pattern first identified in 2006 and reaffirmed in 2017) point to the same reality: readers scan rather than read line by line. These findings stem from the desktop era and don't map one-to-one to 2026 feed dynamics—yet the directional truth holds: every scene I added stole reading probability from another sentence.
In my 1,900-word piece, that was precisely what happened. Readers went through the first two examples, decoded the pattern by the third ("ah, a story follows every single claim"), and scanned the rest. My most crucial example—the scene carrying the core thesis—sat in seventh position, squarely inside the scanning blind zone. By distributing examples evenly, I had rendered the most valuable one invisible.
What I learned that day: examples are not free. Every scene carries a length cost, an attention cost, and a "pattern fatigue" cost. The question is not "can I make this sentence concrete?"—almost any sentence can be concretized. The real question is: "does this sentence earn that cost?"
I found the most useful answer to this question by adapting Stephen Toulmin's argumentation model. Toulmin's framework broadly suggests that every claim requires data, but the warrant linking data to claim requires backing only when the reader actively challenges it. Warrants already accepted by the reader can remain implicit. Aware of the risk in reducing an academic model to an editorial rule of thumb, its practical translation is this: the example goes to the sentence the reader will challenge; it does not go to the sentence they will nod along with.
This yields a clear conditional map. Three situations where an example is mandatory:
1. A claim the reader is hearing for the first time. The Concreteness chapter in Chip Heath and Dan Heath's Made to Stick (2007) is my primary anchor here: abstract language is an efficient shortcut among experts, but it slides right off a newcomer. The book's classic case is already a textbook before/after pair: "world-class customer service" (abstract, forgettable) versus the Nordstrom employee gift-wrapping an item purchased at another store (scene, unforgettable). A novel claim always demands a scene because the reader has no mental hook to hang it on yet.
2. A counter-intuitive, contestable claim. If I say, "A shorter brief produces better creative work," anyone who has ever worked at an agency will raise an eyebrow. That raised eyebrow is, in Toulmin's terms, a questioned warrant—it demands backing. This is where you spend your scene. Memory research supports this choice: Allan Paivio's dual-coding theory shows that concrete material is coded across both verbal and visual channels, remaining consistently more memorable than abstract material. Note: this finding applies to recall, not direct persuasion. I frame the claim this way: a scene doesn't guarantee persuasion, but it sticks, standing as vivid counter-evidence whenever the reader's internal skepticism flares up.
3. An instruction demanding reader action. The directive "read your draft aloud" remains hollow without a single example demonstrating what you should listen for while reading aloud. A procedural claim demands a before/after pair—which is why this article itself adopts that structural format.
1. Shared ground. Nobody disputes the sentence "The reader's time is limited." Clark and Haviland's "given-new contract" explains the mechanism: a sentence should advance from established common ground to new information; inflating the "given" portion with examples breaches that contract. The reader slows down with an irritating sense of "I already know this, why are you proving it to me?" and feels subtly talked down to. The Heath brothers reach the same conclusion: when a shared schema exists, abstraction is a shortcut—use it.
2. Transition and bridge sentences. A bridge sentence like "Does this apply in every situation?" exists to direct traffic, not carry cargo. Put excessive weight on a bridge and it collapses.
3. A summary of an already concretized section. Once you have delivered the scene and the reader has visualized it, the closing sentence can—and should—remain abstract. The sandwich structure recommended by Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style (2014) is built precisely on this: generalization, example, return to generalization. An abstract sentence following an example is no longer sceneless—it inherits the scene.
We should borrow one more insight from Pinker, because he diagnoses the root cause: the primary source of abstraction is the "curse of knowledge." Because the writer already holds concrete examples in mind, they forget to put them on the page; the reader gets only the abstract shell. Concretization, in this sense, is not ornamentation—it is the restoration of data that lived in the writer's head but fell out of the draft. When I wrote "Quality content is important," I actually had three vivid scenes in my mind; I just failed to put them into the text.
Pair 1 — Example added, kept. Before: "The target audience definition in the brief must be clear." After: "On a project where our brief stated 'target audience: 25–45 professionals,' the designer built for an investment banker while the copywriter wrote for a startup founder; we lost two weeks. Now we put a single name in the brief: 'Ayşe will read this—she's 34, a marketing manager, scanning on her phone between meetings.'" Rationale: instruction sentence + open to pushback ("write for just one person?")—double burden of proof, fully deserves the scene.
Pair 2 — Example added, kept. Before: "Passive voice weakens the sentence." After: "When I changed 'A decision was reached during the meeting' to 'The managing director made the call during the meeting,' the client asked for the first time: which managing director, which call? The passive sentence wasn't even prompting questions." Rationale: not counter-intuitive, but an abstract grammatical claim—it required a recognition scene so readers could spot it in their own copy.
Pair 3 — Example added, bloated, reverted. Before: To the sentence "Every text must answer a reader's question," I had attached a three-paragraph client anecdote. Then I realized: at that point in the article, this was already shared ground—the prior two sections had proved it. I cut the three paragraphs; the sentence stood alone and hit harder. Rationale: reproving established ground slows the reader down.
Pair 4 — Example cut, reduced to a single sentence. In an older draft, I backed the claim "consistency builds trust" with two separate examples. The second example followed the exact pattern of the first: zero new information. I deleted it and appended a seven-word generalization to the tail of the first example. Rationale: a second example for the same claim is repetition, not proof.
Decision four points to a corollary rule: the scene must represent the typical cross-section of the claim, not an extreme edge case. That is the risk with the Nordstrom story—the reader dismisses the claim as an outlier: "that only happens at Nordstrom." If you must use an edge case, follow it immediately with a single abstract sentence widening the scope; the concrete-abstract sandwich repairs the interpretive drift.
One final distinction: a scene is not the only currency for concretization. The nature of your claim determines which coin you pay with:
For an existential claim ("such a thing is possible"), a single scene suffices—one instance proves existence. For a frequency claim ("this is usually the case"), a scene is insufficient and misleading, inviting the anecdotal fallacy; here you need data. A procedural claim ("do X this way") demands a before/after pair. An established common-ground claim requires none of them—move straight through. In this piece, I paid for the readership claim with Nielsen's data and the editing claims with before/after pairs; the mix is deliberate.
Here is the pass I run on a finished draft: I scan the text once strictly for abstraction—concept subjects, "importance" family predicates, missing agents. For every highlighted sentence, I ask one question: will the reader push back on this, or are they hearing it for the first time? If yes, provide a scene (or data, if it's a frequency claim). If no, there are two choices: simplify or delete. Adding an example is not a third option.
The single rule to take back to your workbench: Spend your example on the objection, not the sentence—a scene for every claim that makes the reader raise an eyebrow, silence for every sentence they nod along with.
Whenever I broke this rule, I either left claims unproven or drowned the reader in proof. The narrow strip between the two is the craft itself. Now review your latest draft and check which side it leans toward.