Noted childhood psychologist, J. Piaget, studied the way people think from birth to adulthood.  What he discovered was revolutionary for his time.  He found that humans can achieve four separate stages of reasoning ability or ways to deal with words and their varying degrees of abstraction.  The first two do not concern us, as they concern sensory motor development, which all normal humans attain. The third and fourth stages are the ones that writers must attend to.

When humans are about eight or nine years old they begin questioning to a certain degree the premises their lives have been built upon. This stage of abstraction, the Concrete Operational Stage,  gives humans the ability to deal with dualities.  Either things are black or they are white -- good or bad -- right or wrong.  For example, Jane, a member of the Jones family, will state that smoking is not good for a person.  More often than not her statement will be based on what she was told or what she has experienced, as this phase gives us the ability to understand the world according to our own experiences. Therefore, if Marie tells a Jane that she had kumquats with her dinner, Jane will either want to try them or not depending on her previous experience with foods with strange sounding names. For example, if Jane had eaten okra and she liked it, she will more willing to try kumquats; on the other hand, if she had a bad experience with okra, she will not want to try kumquats. The Concrete thinker is not even tempted to try kumquats because she has made a decision-- foreign sounding food is awful-- that will last her entire lifetime. (A caveat--education can help the concrete person change, but she must want that change before it can happen). Another thing to consider with people who have Concrete thinking is that they are not limited in intelligence; it just means a person has difficulty grappling with word abstractions.

Now, let's look at the fourth stage, Formal Operations. People of Forman Operations hold diverse opinions about the same issues; for example, they may believe abortion is wrong, but they also believe, abortion is necessary when rape or underage pregnancy are underlying conditions to the pregnancy.  To Concrete Operations person, a Formal Operator seems to sit on a fence about every issue.  Thinking about our former example, if we would reverse the situation and Marie, who is a Formal Operator, were offered a kumquat, she would think of all the reasons that she should and shouldn't eat the fruit, and if she did not have enough information, she would take the plunge and eat it, as risk-taking is another trait of this stage of thinking.  If a person becomes a Formal Operations Thinker, it will occur after the age of twelve.  Now here's the kicker:  Piaget suggested that approximately only 20% of the population ever achieves this stage.  Scientists after him suggest that the figure is probably closer to 15%.

Think of the implications:  any audience is comprised of 80% Concrete and 20% Formal thinkers.  Thus, we turn to our purpose: how to reach all  readers.   That's where Hayakawa's comes in.  H. I. Hayakawa was famous in the 1940s and 1950s for his rhetorical abstraction ladder.  It's shown below.  What this ladder tells us is that any good writing includes all levels of abstraction, level one specifically. 

What this means is that each and every one body paragraphs needs a specific quote, example, situation or detail, so that the needs of both the Concrete and Abstract thinker are met. Because if a writer wants a Concrete thinker to understand what he means, he must be explicit -- going so far as to draw pictures with words, so to speak. In other words, be specific. In other words, name things in paragraphs.  Don't just say tennis shoes, say Nike. Don't say downtown, say on the corner of Riverside and Washington. If specifics are not used, the Concrete thinker only has his experience to draw from.

By the way, using the varying levels in daily conversation will help everyone communicate better!

Adding Vividness To Writing