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What’s Bad About “Good” and “Bad”

Broad evaluative terms such as good and bad can seduce you into stopping your thinking while it is still too general and ill-defined—a matter discussed at length in The Judgment Reflex section of Chapter 2. If you train yourself to select more precise words whenever you encounter good and bad in your drafts, not only will your prose become clearer but also the search for new words will probably start you thinking again, sharpening your ideas. If, for example, you find yourself writing a sentence such as “The subcommittee made a bad decision,” ask yourself why you called it a bad decision. A revision to “The subcommittee made a shortsighted decision” indicates what in fact is bad about the decision and sets you up to discuss why the decision was myopic, further developing the idea.

Be aware that often evaluative terms are disguised as neutrally descriptive ones—natural, for instance, and realistic. Realistic according to whom, and defined by what criteria? Something is natural according to a given idea about nature—an assumption—and the same goes for moral. These are not terms that mean separately from a particular context or ideology, that is, an assumed hierarchy of value. Similarly, in a sentence such as “Society disapproves of interracial marriage,” the broad and apparently neutral term society can blind you to a host of important distinctions about social class, about a particular culture, and so on.

Concrete and Abstract Diction

At its best, effective analytical prose uses both concrete and abstract words. Simply defined, concrete diction brings things to life by offering readers words that play on their senses. Telephone, eggshell, crystalline, azure, striped, kneel, flare, and burp are examples of concrete diction. You need concrete language whenever you are describing what happens or what something looks like—in a laboratory experiment, in a military action, in a painting or film sequence. The language of evidence consists of concrete diction. It allows us to see for ourselves the basis of a person’s convictions in the stuff of lived experience.

By contrast, abstract diction refers to words that designate concepts and categories. Virility, ideology, love, definitive, desultory, conscientious, classify, and ameliorate are examples of abstract diction. So are democracy, fascism, benevolence, and sentimentality. Abstract words give us the language of ideas. We cannot do without abstract terms, and yet writing made up only of such words loses contact with experience, with the world that we can apprehend through our senses.

The line between abstract and concrete is not always as clear as these examples may suggest. You may recall the ladder of abstraction that we discuss in the section entitled Generalizing in Chapter 2. There, we propose that abstract and concrete are not hard-and-fast categories so much as a continuum, a sliding scale. Word A (for example, machine) may be more abstract than word B (computer) but more concrete than word C (technology).

Concrete and abstract diction need each other. Concrete diction illustrates and anchors the generalizations that abstract diction expresses. Notice the concrete language used to define the abstraction provinciality in this example:

There is no cure for provinciality like traveling abroad. In America, the waiter who fails to bring the check promptly at the end of the meal we rightly convict for not being watchful. But in England, after waiting interminably for the check and becoming increasingly irate, we learn that only an ill-mannered waiter would bring it without being asked. We have been rude, not he.

In the following example, the abstract terms causality, fiction, and conjunction are integrated with concrete diction in the second sentence:

According to the philosopher David Hume, causality is a kind of fiction that we ascribe to what he called “the constant conjunction of observed events.” If a person gets hit in the eye and a black semicircle develops underneath it, that does not necessarily