Up and Down the Ladder
Move deliberately between the concrete floor and the abstract view — avoid the mushy middle.
Every noun you write sits somewhere on a vertical scale. At the bottom: the actual thing — a 1967 Fender Stratocaster with a cigarette burn on the headstock. At the top: art, culture, value, meaning. In between: instrument, guitar, electric guitar, American guitar. That middle zone is where most prose gets stuck, because the words feel specific enough. They aren't. 'Guitar' gives a reader a category. The Strat with the burn gives them a room.
The move is deliberate travel. You drop to the concrete floor to show; you climb to the abstract summit to say what it means. The error isn't living at one end — a poem can sustain the concrete for a long time, an argument can live mostly in the abstract — it's getting stranded in the middle, where words like 'vehicle,' 'conflict,' 'issue,' and 'situation' accumulate without ever touching ground or sky.
When it doesn't apply: some contexts are correctly abstract throughout — legal definition, philosophical argument, policy summary — and forcing a concrete detail would be decoration, not depth. And a single short sentence doesn't have room to make the trip; the ladder is a paragraph-level or essay-level tool, not a word-level one. Use it when you feel your prose drifting vague and compliant, doing its job on paper without actually landing anywhere.
In practice
Stuck in the middle
She had a difficult childhood marked by instability and loss.
She grew up in four different school districts before eighth grade; her mother's boyfriend moved out the same week as the cat.
The revision drops to the floor — enrollment records, a specific loss — and the abstraction ('difficult childhood') becomes something the reader assembles themselves, which means they feel it.
Concrete without the climb
He counted the ceiling tiles every night. There were forty-two. He had counted them before.
He counted the ceiling tiles every night. There were forty-two. He had counted them before. This is what dread does to a person — turns them into an accountant of small, fixed things.
The detail was already strong; adding one rung upward tells the reader what to do with it and makes the concrete retroactively mean something.
Abstract opener, concrete payoff
The town had seen better days. Things had declined. Nobody talked about it much.
The town had seen better days — the hardware store, the diner, the one movie theater with its marquee stuck mid-title since 2009. Nobody talked about it much.
The abstraction stays as a gesture, but the ladder descends immediately after; the reader gets both the summary and the evidence.
Common questions
- What is the ladder of abstraction in writing?
- The ladder of abstraction, drawn from S.I. Hayakawa's work, describes a vertical scale from concrete specifics (a particular dog, a particular street) to broad abstractions (animal, place, society). In writing, the concept is used to diagnose vagueness: prose that stays in the middle of the ladder — specific enough to seem solid, abstract enough to avoid commitment — loses the reader without them knowing why.
- How do I know if my writing is too abstract?
- Ask whether a reader could draw or photograph what you're describing. Words like 'situation,' 'issue,' 'various,' 'things,' and 'aspects' are ladder-middle words — they name categories, not instances. If you can replace a noun or phrase with something that has a color, a weight, or a price tag, the abstract version probably isn't doing enough.
- Do I always need to go back and forth between concrete and abstract?
- No — some writing justifiably stays at one end. A philosophical argument might remain largely abstract; a piece of immersive scene-writing might stay on the ground. The problem is involuntary drift to the middle, where language is neither image nor idea. Deliberate choice of level is always correct; unconscious muddling in between is what the technique addresses.
- What's the difference between a specific detail and a concrete detail?
- Specificity means narrowed-down ('a red car' rather than 'a vehicle'); concreteness means sensory or factual — something that exists in the physical world or can be verified ('a 1994 Civic with a cracked passenger mirror'). Both are lower on the ladder than abstraction, and the most useful details are usually both specific and concrete at once.
Inside Verbaria
Verbaria's editor flags ladder-middle words — 'situation,' 'various,' 'aspects,' 'issues,' 'things' — and the craft toolbox entry for this technique walks you through dropping the flagged phrase to its concrete equivalent or lifting it to a clean abstraction.
Where it comes from: S.I. Hayakawa's ladder of abstraction (Language in Thought and Action, 1949).
This is one of the tools inside Verbaria — the writing room that names the craft while you work. Read the writing.