Grammarians make the distinction between concrete and abstract nouns, and writing teachers routinely enjoin their students to prefer the former to the latter. A concrete noun names something we perceive in the world with one of our five senses; an abstract noun we perceive only with our mind. A concrete noun denotes something regarded as a thing, while an abstract noun denotes an idea. Because strong writing composes images, the concrete noun reaches that goal more surely.
In such a clear-cut world, a tree and a desk and the great sun itself are concrete nouns because we can see all three such things, and touch or feel them as well. Conversely, the beauty I admire in a stately pine tree is an abstraction, an idea I draw out of (that, in fact, is the derivation of the adjective abstract) that concrete tree I see, making the word beauty signify an idea, not a thing, I may observe elsewhere—in a finely designed desk, in the intense orange sun at daybreak, or in another’s face that might very well tremble my heart. According to the way our natural language works, then, abstract ideas are to be seen only in concrete things.
But are there no points between these two extremes? Can it not be difficult sometimes to say whether a noun is either concrete or abstract? If I point out someone in a crowd and say, I see my friend over there, do I see, in fact, a materialized friend, or do I see a concrete person whose physical attributes identify him to me as my friend? A friend, after all, is someone who represents friendship, a value, an abstraction, a reality I do not perceive with any of my senses, but with my mind or heart. So is the noun friend concrete or abstract? And if I am counseled to prefer the concrete to the abstract, would I really be writing better if I wrote I see that person who is my friend over there? I know no writing teacher who would say yes.
These reflections come to mind because I found myself objecting ill-fatedly recently to the noun submission in this phrase from a student’s paper: the document summarized key aspects of the submission process. I pointed out that submission is an abstract noun (words which end in –sion, –tion, –ness and a number of other suffixes are abstract in form), and I explained the same points I have set out here. But my student had a very good retort to my objection: that in her work, a submission is indeed a very objective thing; that they are packets of paper or electronic files of information solicited and returned, received and seen and evaluated. In her professional circumstance, a submission is a specific object, and to refer to such a thing otherwise would only encumber a formally abstract noun used by convention very concretely every day.
And indeed I believe that explanation is correct. The degree to which something is concrete or abstract depends on what the logicians call its universe of discourse, the world we are talking about and how we regard the objects we are naming and predicating something of in that particular context. And this is more than a theoretical point (though its philosophical implications are immense), because we can realize now that it is how and where a noun is used, not its formal construction, which will help us decide whether to retain it or judge it needlessly abstract. To say nothing of the fact that only concrete nouns, or nouns used so, may have a plural form; abstract nouns can appear only in the singular. In her work, my student no doubt receives submissions all the time, a fact that will substantiate her case.
Nonetheless, we are often given over, as writing teachers worry, to the unnecessarily abstract, and there remains an instance of this in that same phrase my student wrote: it is a sustainable objection to protest over the noun process there. If we can accept submission as a de facto concrete noun, we would be hard pressed to be able to do the same with process. That noun is both abstract and redundant, and when we sense that such is the case, we are obligated to consider doing the hardest thing a writer can do: delete. Here, though, we must delete and add, and what we add will strengthen the concrete force of the statement: the document summarized key aspects of making a submission. Even if we could point to a technically fine distinction between the submission and the process of submitting one, would that distinction be worth the making?
We should prefer the concrete to the abstract, it is true, but we should apply that counsel where and when it will uproot vague and general references—not where the complexity of our perceptions regards as concrete what is otherwise formally abstract.
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