A Self Made of Words: Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing

Concrete and Abstract Diction

50 } The nature of your written self is influenced not only by the extent of your reliance on adjectives and adverbs but also by whether your diction tends to be concrete or abstract . Concrete diction refers to things that exist in a physical, tangible, visible form, such as a weasel, a ribbon, an arrowhead, ora tail. A preponderance of concrete diction is likely to suggest a down-­ to-­ earth persona, someone who’s in touch with the specifics of immediate experience , as when I tell about mydog who always lifts his leg on the same tree at the end of my neighbor’s drive, or when Annie Dillard tells about her first sight of a weasel: Weasel! I’d never seen one before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-­ furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s, he would have made a good arrowhead. Abstract diction, by contrast, refers to things that do not exist in physical form, such as beliefs, feelings, ideas, thought processes, and psychological tendencies. So a preponderance of abstract diction is likely to convey an intellectualized persona, as in this sentence from Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key: Concrete and Abstract Diction { 51 The power of understanding symbols, i.e., of regarding everything about a sense-­ datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. Though abstractions are by definition intangible, they are no less real and compelling, as you probably know from moments when you have affirmed your belief in something, perhaps with a placard in hand or a fist in the air, or when you’ve been roused to anger or joy by something that happened to you. So in a very real sense, one type of diction is not better or worse than the other, though handbooks and teachers have often recommended the use of concrete rather than abstract diction. Yet one need only recall a single sentence from the Declaration of Independence to recognize the importance of abstract diction: “We hold these truths to be self-­evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .” Imagine how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to express those truths in concrete diction, and you can see that the choice of concrete or abstract diction is to a significant extent determined by one’s subject matter and purpose. And the same is true of a related choice between specific and general diction. For example, in that earlier sentence about my dog lifting his leg, I could 52 } have referred to him as “my aged Welsh Terrier” rather than “my dog,” and I could have referred to “the tree” as “the towering oak,” but the specificity would have been superfluous and distracting.The challenge, then, is to attune your diction to the changing demands of both your subject matter and the persona that you aim to project. Here, for example, is a paragraph from my vertigoepisode , which I’ve revised to illustrate how the changing demands of one’s subject and persona can lead to alternations between abstract and concrete diction: Everything seemed to be happening so fast—not only the spin of the room but also the rush of my thoughts and my panicky feelings—that it seemed as if I had lost control of myself, until suddenly without even thinking about it, I raised the index finger of my right hand in front of my nose, right between my eyes, stared at the finger, and the spinning came to a stop. I don’t know what moved me to raise my finger like that, as if it were standing at attention, except for some profound will to take control of things— to stop the spinning room and to stop my spinning head. As you can see, this paragraph, dealing with the climax of my vertigo experience, begins by focusing on my stressful state of mind, so the first half of the long opening sentence is dominated by abstract and...