Even where as in Burke’s speech “On Conciliation with America,” abstractness is not vagueness, the style would be more effective for the richer feeling that hangs over and around a concrete vocabulary.  The great vividness of Macaulay’s style, and its bold over so many readers, is largely due to his unfailing use of the specific word.  If you will take the trouble to notice what arguments in the last few months have seemed to you especially persuasive, you will be surprised to find how definite and concrete the terms are that they use.

Accordingly, if you wish to keep the readers of your argument awake and attentive, use terms that touch their everyday experience.  If you are arguing for the establishment of a commission form of government, give in dollars and cents the sum that it cost under the old system to pave the three hundred yards of A Street, between 12th and 13th streets.  The late Mr. Godkin of the New York Evening Post, in his lifelong campaign against corrupt government, to bring home to his readers the actual state of their city government and the character of the men who ran it, used their nicknames; “Long John” Corrigan, for example (if there had been such a personage); and “Bath-house John Somebody” has been a feature of campaigns in Chicago.  The value of such names when skillfully used is that by their associations and connotation they do stir feeling.  Likewise if you are arguing before an audience of graduates for a change from a group system to a free elective system in your college, you would use the names of courses with which they would be familiar and the names of professors under whom they had studied.  If you were arguing for the introduction of manual training into a school, you would make taxpayers take an interest in the matter if you gave them the exact numbers of pupils from that school who have gone directly into mills or other work of the kind, and if you describe vividly just what is meant by manual training.  If your description is in general terms they may grant you your principle, and then out of mere inertia and a vague feeling against change vote the other way.

A rough test for concreteness is your vocabulary:  if your words are mostly Anglo-Saxon you will usually be talking about concrete things; if it is Latinate and polysyllabic it is probably abstract and general.  Most of the things and actions of everyday life, the individual things like “walls” and “puppies,” “summer” and “boys,” “buying” and “selling,” “praying” and “singing,” have names belonging to the Anglo-Saxon part of the language; and though there are many exceptions, like “tables,” and “telephones,” and “professors,” yet the more your vocabulary consists of the non-Latinate words, the more likely it is to be concrete, and therefore to keep your readers’ attention and feelings alive.  Use the simple terms of everyday life, therefore, rather than the learned words which would serve you if you were generalizing from many cases.  Stick to the single case before you and to the interests of the particular people you are trying to win over.  To touch their feelings remember that you must talk about the things they have feelings about.