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In a guide where I slapped an example onto every abstract sentence, word count doubled and readership dropped—because examples carry a cost, and sometimes an abstract sentence gets the job done faster.
For years, I believed in a single rule: whenever you see an abstract sentence, drop an example under it. Set a scene, write a scenario, add a screenshot. I followed this rule to the letter in an onboarding guide—a scene for every claim, a "suppose that" scenario for every concept. The text doubled in length. Readers came back, but not with praise: "It's too long; I got bored before reaching the actual point." That day, I realized something: examples aren't free. An example is a cost—paid out of reader time and text density. And sometimes, an abstract sentence works faster than an example.
The core thesis of the week is sound: sentences like "quality content matters" stop no one, whereas a single concrete scene stops everyone. My objection isn't to the thesis itself, but to the thesis turned dogma. Because in the years I spent working under the "an example for every abstract sentence" reflex, I ruined a draft at least three times specifically because I added an example.
"Show, don't tell" originated from a fair observation: a writer cannot know what the reader doesn't know. Steven Pinker calls this the curse of knowledge in The Sense of Style—the root of bad writing isn't abstraction itself, but the writer inaccurately modeling reader knowledge. In other words, the cure isn't universal examples; the cure is fixing your reader model.
When the rule gets caricatured, it morphs into this: an example is the automatic antidote to any claim. Yet an example only generates value if it carries a claim that lacks a mental image in the reader's mind; if it merely reconstructs a scene the reader already knows, it just inflates word count and lowers information density. The decision isn't grammatical—a sentence doesn't need an example just because it's abstract. The decision is dictated by the reader's information gap in that sentence.
In a piece written for experienced marketers, I drafted the following paragraph:
Before: "Segmentation increases conversions. For instance, if you split an email list into new subscribers and past customers, you can send promotional content to new subscribers and loyalty content to past customers; this way, each group gets a relevant message and..."
For three full sentences, I explained what that reader had been doing every single day for five years. The feedback was verbatim: "An intro that treats me like a child." The edited version:
After: "You already know segmentation boosts conversions; what you don't know is where to draw the line on how many segments you actually need."
A single sentence, no example, abstract—and faster. The expertise reversal effect literature in cognitive load theory points in the exact same direction: research by Slava Kalyuga and colleagues shows that extra explanations and examples that aid novices create redundant cognitive load for experts. These experiments were conducted on instructional materials, so generalizing them one-to-one to blog readers would be unfair; yet it aligns precisely with my editing desk observations: an example detailing a scene an expert reader already knows reads like disrespect.
I once made the claim: "Content calendar consistency delivers higher returns than sporadic brilliant posts." Trying to make it concrete, I threw in my most vivid example: the weekly newsletter cadence of an e-commerce brand. Half the comments were: "Sure, this works in e-commerce, but no one reads newsletters in B2B."
The example hadn't supported the claim; it had trapped the claim within its own borders. A single anecdote pulls the reader's generalization into the walls of that anecdote—a 2005 experimental study by Robert Goldstone and Ji Son also demonstrates that excessively concrete examples undermine transfer, i.e., applying what was learned to new contexts. There are three signals of a narrow example that I look for during editing: "but this only applies to X" objections in comments; reader summaries that reduce the core claim to the example's sub-case; and most practically—the scope of the sentence instantly expanding once the example is deleted.
The type I am most embarrassed by. In an article, to support the claim "a consistent publishing cadence builds trust," I used the growth story of my own newsletter. The scene was vivid, the details were engaging; but readers remembered my success, not the claim. Richard Mayer's line of research on the seductive details effect aligns with this: interesting yet loosely related details can impair retention and comprehension. (Effect sizes vary across studies, so let's not overstate it—but it is more than enough to refute the assumption that "a shiny example is always a good example.")
My yardstick is now this: does the example concretize the weakest, most contentious part of the claim, or the part that is already accepted? If it's the latter, the writer is showing off rather than serving the reader.
If this post is read as "never give examples," it falls into the very narrowness it critiques. Counter-example: in a piece written for beginners, the sentence "scope ambiguity in a brief generates revisions" achieved nothing on its own. It worked once I added this scene:
"The brief asked for 'a modern visual language.' The designer understood pastel minimalism; the client expected neon gradients. Three revisions, two weeks."
Here, the example is essential because the reader has no mental picture of "scope ambiguity" yet. The concreteness fading literature in educational psychology (Emily Fyfe, Nicole McNeil, and colleagues) strikes this balance: a concrete example is not the final stop of durable learning, but temporary scaffolding—the goal is a progressive transition from concrete to abstract. Getting stuck in the concrete impairs transfer. So neither example-free abstraction nor an example downpour; build the scaffolding, then tear it down.
That's why summary paragraphs, transition sentences, and conclusions can work without examples: the reader has already seen the examples in the body, where abstraction serves a consolidation function. That was my exact mistake in the onboarding guide—I never dismantled the scaffolding. (A note of honesty: even my observation that "completion rates dropped" isn't pristine data; example-laden text is longer, and longer text naturally sees lower completion. Isolating this would require A/B testing example-rich vs. example-free variants of equal length, which I didn't do.)
Now, when reviewing a draft, I ask two questions for every sentence:
The single transferable rule: An example is not proof of a claim; it is filler for a gap in the reader's mind—if there is no gap, there should be no example. In your next draft, write a single note beside every example: "What gap does this fill?" Any example you can't answer for is polishing your ego while keeping the reader waiting.