Much schooling is aimed at encouraging us to
develop generalizations that accurately encapsulate a body of facts or a set of
experiences. Our claims in an argument
are generalizations based on evidence. Teachers may be familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy (organization into a
hierarchy) of intellectual skills which prizes your ability to abstract from
your experience or data to summarize and draw conclusions from that specific
information.
However, you will often find that writing which emphasizes
the concrete experience, the fact over the statistic, the individual character
over the type, is not only more interesting but more compelling in the
arguments it makes.
The refrain heard from many writing teachers is “Details! I want details!”
The question is, What’s a detail? It’s not such a simple question to answer,
because it depends on what your purpose is.
The concept of a detail relates to the notion of “abstraction,” which is
on the opposite end of a continuum from a concrete detail:
Blue………………………………………………Color
Live
|
Animal
|
Bird
|
Chicken
|
Rhode Island Red
|
Rooster
|
Roger
|
Color is a category, a level above the specific color
“blue” in order of abstraction. The
writer S.I. Hayakawa developed the notion of a “Ladder of Abstraction” to give
a pictorial understanding of the different layers of specificity or abstraction
possible in the English language.
To the right
is a sample Ladder of Abstraction, in which a specific
rooster,
Roger, is topped by ever broader categories which contain,
but also
become ever further removed from, the experience of
the actual
rooster—Roger.
In your
writing, as in any professional’s, you will find a need to
operate at
different levels of the Ladder, but never lose sight
of
Roger. Many of the exercises in Copia will push you to get very “concrete”:
to find words
that name or describe at the Roger level of the Ladder.
You’ll find
that it’s often not as easy as it seems it should be,
probably
because you have been trained much of your life to generalize.
So get ready
to wrestle with details—things in
themselves.
Discerning the General and the Specific
You have been introduced to the Abstraction Ladder, which
shows the relationship between the specific item itself (or, at least, the word
that signifies that thing) and the various abstract categories that the individual
item might belong to.
This has a great deal of
usefulness in reading accurately and arranging your sentences in your
writing. Writers often proceed from
general statements to more specific ones or vice versa, the specifics providing
instances or examples or reasons for their claims.
Exercise
Read the paragraph below, taken from Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. Rewrite each sentence, assigning it a number
from 1 to 3, one being the general, 3 being specific, and 2 coming in between.
Sweetness is a
desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end
there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the
experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a
certain kind of perfection. When writers
like Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold used the expression “sweetness and
light” to name their highest ideal (Swift called the “two noblest of things”;
Arnold, the ultimate aim of civilization), they were drawing on a sentences of
the word sweetness going back to
classical times, a sentences that has largely been lost to us. The best land was said to be sweet; so were
the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the
most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare
calls spring the “sweet o’ the year.” Lent by the tongue to all other sense
organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or
gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering
equal sign, the word sweetness,
denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.
Exercise
Below is an excerpt from British historian J. H. Plumb’s
essay, “The Noble Houses.”
As you read it, outline the “thesis,” concrete (Roger-level)
evidence, and the intermediate claims and summary evidence. In other words, in your outline, recognize
four rungs on the abstraction ladder for this excerpt. You should be able to categorize sentences
into four levels of abstraction.
Land
equaled power: that simple equation was
quickly grasped and men set about deliberately extending their acres. They looked for heiresses of wide lands; they
stopped providing estates for their younger sons, turning them out into the
professions (law, Church, army, navy, or, if need be, commerce); they devised
strict legal settlements so that the heir to great territories became merely
the tenant for life—for they hoped by these strict entails that their
agglomerations of wealth and power might be protected from the dissolute, the
incompetent, the mad. Naturally, the
well-endowed succeeded at the expense of the lesser gentry. They had the resources or the credit to buy
up what became available; they could make better bids for heiresses; they could
afford more specialized advice, legal or practical, take risks and win profits
from more experimental farming or indulge their fancy in more industrial
enterprises. Coral-like, their wealth
grew. Sometimes the disasters of
life—lack of heirs, civil war, insanity not in one but several generations—pulled
a great family down, but when it did it usually enriched the few that remained,
or scattered opportunities to the lesser gentry. Furthermore, the greater the family and the
wider its local social and political power, the more certain it could be of
playing an important and lucrative part in national life; and from this came
titles, honours, sinecures, pensions, the great offices of Church or State.
In
1711, young Thomas Pelham-Holles, aged eighteen, succeeded his relative the
Duke of Newcastle in estates (although not in title) and became the possessor
of thousands of acres in a dozen counties of England, enjoying a rent-roll of
more than £30,000 a year (multiply by 12 for modern pounds; by 36 for
dollars). At twenty-one he was made
Viscount and Earl and Lord Lieutenant for two counties, a year later Marquess
and Duke, two years later Lord Chamberlain and Privy Councillor, and a year
after that Knight of the Garter, and so on and so forth. He could personally influence the election of
a dozen members of Parliament.
Nottinghamshire and Sussex knew him as their master. The great houses that he built or
adorned—Nottingham Castle, completely remodeled, high on its cliff above the
town; Haughton, his hunting lodge in The Dukeries; Claremont, his uncle’s vast
new Vanbrugh palace for which he redesigned the landscape; the old family
mansions of his father, Halland and Bishopstone, both gutted and
re-created—these were the necessary symbols of his territorial greatness. Like the gold plate that loaded his table and
the hordes of servants that attended him on every journey, they were the
necessities of his social status. Vast
palaces, extravagant living, profusion in every act of life were compulsive in
a world that equated wealth with power.
Nor
was the Duke of Newcastle exceptional.
The Dukes of Bedford enjoyed an income equally large from the vast
estates of their…
Plumb, J. H.
“The Noble Houses of 18th Century England.” Men and
Centuries. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. 72, 73. Print.
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