Abstractitis is a term of art in the study and practice of writing, and it refers to what we might call literary inflammation, sentences whose meaning is constricted because they are so swollen with abstract nouns. Here’s an example: Last month a department management process evaluation analysis was submitted by district administration. This, we should note, is a particularly serious case of the disease.
To appreciate just how debilitated a sentence like that is, let’s compare it to a version not entirely healed itself, but nonetheless solidly on the road to recovery: District administrators submitted last month an analysis of the way managers evaluate how their departments receive, fill, and ship orders. We will compare the diction and structure of the two sentences in a moment, but we should first observe how differently the two statements strike us. A generalized haze has overcome the first sentence, and we have been asked to look in a certain direction without being told what to look for. The revision has dispersed that haze to some degree by adding details of actors and action.
It is very likely the case, I believe, that abstractitis arises from our predilection for writing in the passive voice. Voice is a verbal property, and it refers to whether the subject of the verb is in fact the enactor of the action. English verbs have two voices, active and passive, and in the original version of our example, the verb was submitted is in the passive voice because the performer of that action, district administration, has been displaced into a prepositional phrase. The grammatical subject of the sentence, a department management process evaluation analysis, is no longer real, but merely formal.
But the etiology of abstractitis is abstraction. What we call an abstraction is an idea, a notion we have in our mind instead of a concrete something we perceive in the world around us. All nouns name things, wherever they are, and in grammar we make the distinction between concrete nouns and abstract nouns: concrete nouns name something we can perceive in the external world with one of our five senses (a fork or car or building, all appealing to sight or touch), and abstract nouns name things we perceive with only our mind (hope or anxiety or peace). We find ideas, though, in the things around us, and so the work of good writing is to stay in this world and make sentences and paragraphs with a judicious mix of both kinds of nouns—abstract nouns to express ideas and concrete nouns to show where we saw those ideas lodge themselves. We must, in other words, think abstractly but express concretely—at least as concretely as the subject will allow.
When abstract nouns predominate, however, linguistic inflammation sets in, and when the environment includes a passive verb, the prognosis is not good. To see how we might improve our chances of recovery, let’s compare the example with the suggested revision. Notice first that the passive verb of the original has been converted to the active voice. To do that, we found in the abstraction administration the individuals who could act, thereby giving the verb submitted an actual subject: district administrators submitted. Notice, too, that we pushed the phrase denoting time, last month, out of its primary position, yielding that important space to what is arguably most important, the subject and agent of the action.
Next, we’ve broken up the string of four adjectives (all nouns in their own right being forced into service as adjectives), replacing the abstraction process with the concrete noun way, to figuratively mean manner or means. We then converted the abstraction evaluation into its corresponding transitive verb evaluated, and found the managers in their departments. These changes constituted an entirely new sentence structure, which then easily prompted the necessary practicalities of receiving, filling, and shipping orders—all actions and things in the real world. The anemic pallor grows sanguine.
There will always be—and there should always be—a creative tension between the concrete and the abstract. That tension is in the very nature of things, things as they are and as we experience them. But art, the art of writing included, has to do with the embodiment of ideas, the making of images that bear the marks of our ideas. To achieve that goal, we keep our eyes on the form of what we’ve written, and when our linguistic health has lapsed, we try to observe the symptoms and apply other choices that are available. Writing can be a healing art.
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