Balanced Writing

Stephen Donatelli

Balanced Writing appears on this website with the gracious permission of Stephen Donatelli. All rights reserved under international and pan-American copyright conventions, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

In Chapter 2 of his guidebook to poetry, The ABC of Reading, the American poet Ezra Pound discusses how to make effective generalizations and abstractions. "An abstract or general statement is GOOD," he says, "if it be ultimately found to correspond with the facts"; or again, with similar emphasis, "A general statement is valuable only in REFERENCE to the known objects or facts." These proclamations seem intuitively right, and while we might disagree with Pound's insistence that it is always necessary to make an abstract statement refer to a known object, most of us would agree that speakers and writers who are intimately familiar with their exact facts or objects (their evidence) have a better chance of making credible generalizations than speakers and writers who are not familiar with such objects.

Because readers expect us to make credible statements based on reliable witnessing, it is important for us to be ready to offer the details of our witnessing as backup for the general statements we make. This holds equally for things that you have witnessed in person, and for the documented findings of others. Although you may not always need to provide all those details, it is good policy to be ready to do so. (This raises the question: "If I want to make a statement for which I don't have proof, can I still make it?" The answer is of course that you may say anything you want; but if you want to be taken seriously by intelligent and skeptical readers, the answer to this question is "no.") In most conversations -- let's admit it -- people are accustomed to speaking generally; there is even a certain enjoyment in doing this. But in written work your statements are under much closer scrutiny and there is a greater expectation that you ought to be making supportable sense. Before looking at some good examples of meaningful (fact-based) abstractions, let's define these two basic terms, "abstraction" and "detail."

Abstractions (or General Statements, or Upper-Level Abstractions)

These may be words, phrases, or even idea-statements whose common characteristic is that they usually mark off some kind of broad conceptual or categorical territory. Examples of abstractive words are: love, justice, racism, wealth, sin, and philanthropy. Examples of abstractive phrases are: aimless and wasted youth, "no commercial potential," and the infinite reaches of space. Examples of complete abstractive sentences are: Italians are a personable and hospitable people; One must have an innate talent to excel in mathematics; and Medieval cathedral construction celebrates the pilgrim's vertical aspiration toward grace.

Abstractive words, phrases, and statements are essential to writing; they become meaningful or "filled with meaning" for readers when the reader is directed to facts that "fill" them and make them valid. Abstractive usages always have this quality, then: they contain - at least potentially -- additional levels of detail. For example, the word sin above is a wonderfully broad category word ... it is very abstract. But it contains by implication many different kinds of theologically recognized sins, such as gluttony, envy, pride, and sloth. If I were to say, A life of sin ruined him, I would be making an accurate generalization (assuming that the individual in question really did ruin himself by sinning.) On the other hand, my reader doesn't really know how this poor soul ruined himself, exactly. My statement doesn't tell the reader that this sinner was a particularly jealous and envious man (a fact that "fills" the word sin somewhat), and that his behavior wrecked his marriage and alienated his business associates (two facts that "fill" the word sin even further). An abstraction like sin will usually lead the skeptical reader to expect additional informative and fulfulling details like these. But what are "details," and what does it mean to use them effectively in the course of making persuasive general statements?

Details (or Lower-level Abstractions)

Since all language is symbolic (i.e. words themselves are not the things they stand for), highly abstractive words like sin and words of lesser abstraction like envy are all, by definition, "abstract." (In other words, the word envy is not the same thing as an envious act.) Within this symbolic or abstractive range, however, some words are much less abstractive and more detailed than others. In his book, Language in Thought and Action, S.I. Hayakawa shows the difference between upper- and lower-level abstractions with an amusing map that he calls the "abstraction ladder." He begins by using the example of a cow (named "Bessie"), standing in a field. Bessie herself is not a word, not an abstraction. But the word we use to designate her -- Bessie -- is an abstraction. Even so, this abstraction ("Bessie") is a very detailed one: it designates a unique individual animal. But Bessie is also a cow. And so when we use the word "cow" to refer to her, we have moved up a rung on the abstraction ladder from the word "Bessie." Furthermore, a few of the features unique to Bessie are now lost when we use this new word "cow." As we climb further up Hayakawa's abstraction ladder, we discover language that is still in a sense referring to Bessie, although this language has now become vaguer in its relation to her. Above and beyond the relatively detailed or lower-level abstractive words "Bessie" or "cow," then, we find in succession words of greater and greater abstraction such as "livestock," "farm assets," "asset," and ultimately (a very big abstraction), "wealth." A writer who wants to speak persuasively about agricultural economics will necessarily be using general language like "farm assets" or "wealth." But such a writer will earn real credibility only if she knows something about farm life and bovine behavior. Such was the case of Temple Grandin, a scholar whom Oliver Sacks profiled in his book, An Anthropologist on Mars. Grandin was interested in the economic productivity of dairy farms, but it was her unprecedented, highly detailed study of the animals' actual behavior that enabled her to make sweeping proposals for reforming the dairy farms and for making them more humane. Temple Grandin's lesson is that generalizations gain power when you really and truly know something about the details they contain.

The Goal: Balancing Abstraction with Detail / Two Examples

Let's look now at two examples of how responsible, fact-filled generalization may be achieved in writing. The first example is taken from an article entitled "Medicine, Morality, and Congenital Anomalies" by Robert L. Martensen, M.D., Ph.D., and David S. Jones in the December 24/31, 1997 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), page 2191. In this short article, the authors examine attitudes of medical professionals toward people with congenital anomalies over the past 100 years. Here is one paragraph:

But even in discussions in which scientific discourse dominated, physicians found a place for blame and sin. Unlike medieval explanations of sin, 19th century explanations focused on the individual. Barnes traced at least 3 "monstrous births" to failed attempts at abortion. Brown focused on alcoholism, claiming that the "habitual intemperence" of a parent could "impair the vital organization of the spermatozoa and ovule." Demonstrating the widespread belief in the malleability of individual heredity, which continued into the 1920's, Brown argued that the legacy of sin could span many generations. Thus, the birth of a child with a deformed limb, deafness, or idiocy could have a cause dating "back to the sins of an ancestor." Whether the original sin was alcoholism or "incestuous connections," the birth of "monsters" could ensue.

Martensen and Jones are making some important generalizations (upper-level abstractions) here. American medicine before 1920 was, they argue, alarmingly mixed-up about moral and medical issues. But this general argument is accompanied at every step by detailed reference to material that supports that argument. The two individuals quoted in the passage -- Barnes and Brown -- were physicians who published their opinions in an 1897 issue of this very magazine; (for purposes of this handout, footnotes to the quotations are here omitted). Here is a fine example of the kind of balanced writing that persuades readers. It contains a plausible general claim, expressed in upper-level abstractive words or terms (blame, sin, the widespread belief in the malleability of individual heredity), and it descends Hayakawa's "abstraction ladder" to fill those abstractions with quoted proofs. The authors' prose also responds to this descent toward detail, and we see this in the appearance of several lower-level abstractive words (alcoholism, deformed limb, deafness, idiocy). In both thought and language, then, this passage reflects balance between abstractive assertion and detailed proof.

A second example is taken from an article entitled "Clean Hands: Reforming the Italian Economy" by Matteo Segalla, published in the Harvard International Review 19/4 (Fall 1997), pp. 46-47, 68. As an illustration of abstractive and detailed writing, this article is interesting because much of the first two-thirds of it is written at the upper-abstractive levels. For example:

The current engine of economic growth in Italy, as well as in most other European countries, is that of small and medium-sized, highly dynamic, export-oriented businesses. These firms regard financial transparency, competition, and technology as essential elements of a thriving social structure.

This passage has many highly abstractive terms in it (such as financial transparency, and thriving social structure). Conversely, it has few or no lower-level details in it: certainly, the designation "Italy" is a momentary lower-level fulfillment of the upper-level category "European countries," but on the whole this passage is one of consistent generalization. Segalla recognizes this, however, and as his article progresses he slowly descends Hayakawa's abstraction ladder toward details that support his general claims. In orderly fashion, Segalla's article gradually moves from the upper-level abstractive topic of (1) "small and medium-sized [European] businesses" to (2) "business today in Italy" to (3) businesses "in Italy's northern region," and finally to (4) the Friuli-Venezia-Guilia region, which produces chairs:

An example of this new development is represented by the so-called "chairs district" .... This district is a highly segmented conglomerate of 800 small-scale factories that produce 32 to 35 percent of the total output of chairs, equal to 30 million items.

As an additional bonus for the detail-seeking reader, Segalla also focuses on (5) a single town, Biella, as a case-study for contemporary Italian small-business practice. Although Segalla saves the disclosure of most of these details for the ending of his article, they still work to fulfull the promise of his earlier abstract statements about European businesses in the 1990's. Note, too, how this skilful descent into the details of his case leads Segalla to use correspondingly detailed (or lower-level abstractive) language in his prose (e.g. the "chairs district," and "800 small chair factories"). The reference to details therefore entails the use of detailed language.

A Brief Post-Script: The Challenge of Writing about Philosophy

Sometimes you will be writing papers for courses on philosophical or theoretical issues, and at these times the material, details, or evidence for your arguments will themselves be very abstractive in nature. Some people think that insisting on "details" when writing about abstractive texts like Edmund Husserl's famous Encyclopedia Brittanica article on "Phenomenology" is an unfair and untenable demand. If philosophical discourse itself is so often abstract, they ask, how can we speak in detail of it? Let's look at an example. It comes from philosopher Donald P. Verene's Vico's Science of Imagination, a study of the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher. Here's a paragraph from Verene's introduction:

Cassirer, a thinker in many ways quite close to Vico, saw the problem of modern philosophy in terms of the difference between the philosophy of spirit or Geist and the philosophy of life or Leben. This distinction was so fundamental for him that he planned a fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to treat it. The distinction between philosophies of Geist and those of Leben is useful for understanding Vico's relation to modern philosophy set against the tradition of reason in Western philosophy.

It is true that Verene's text does make a very broad distinction between two philosophical concepts. But we can see even here that he is trying to anchor these concepts in details that help us to understand them better (e.g., Cassirer and Vico are two apparent proponents of the Geist/Leben dualism). To those who doubt that we may write in a detailed way about philosophy, we can follow Verene's procedure by answering this doubt with a threefold affirmation. First, if one were writing about Verene's text, it would be possible to balance the discussion of the abstract categories with Verene's own lower-level references to such details as Vico and Cassirer, and to the very detailed reference to the planned fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Second, in writing about philosophy, one needn't be restricted to speaking about ideas in the abstract; one may focus on the philosopher's statements, on the text. In the case of the above text, I might object to what I see as Verene's too-casual linking of Cassirer and Vico, and I might express this objection by focussing on the specific detailed passage in Verene's text where he says, "a thinker in many ways quite close to Vico." might wonder "in what ways?" and I might be confused about how close is "quite close" for Verene. I would be questioning Verene's text, then, in a scrupulously detailed way. And third, in writing about philosophical or theoretical issues, you may sometimes be free (but first check with your professor!) to balance abstractive statements with detailed evidence of your own choosing. In the above case, for example, a resourceful student might be able to extend or illustrate Verene's reference to the philosophy of Leben by pointing out a detailed instance in which the philosophy of Leben seems observable, such as D.H. Lawrence's 1927 book, Mornings in Mexico.