“Show your reader what you mean by those abstractions by giving specific examples, details, or statistics. Practice: Use Abstract Language Pick out an abstraction or two from the list you made earlier and write a sentence using it. Start with a short, simple sentence; then rewrite this sentence as many times as you need to, adding more sentences, if you like, and making clear to your readers how you want them to understand the abstraction in this particular situation. What did you notice in doing this? Here’s something else to try: Bring an abstraction to mind, then try to write some sentences that will convey that abstraction to the mind of your reader without including the abstraction itself in your sentences. To do these practices, you had to dig into your word hoard”