Concreteness is the opposite of abstraction. The messages cannot be ambiguous; concreteness helps novices understand new concepts. Examples cut through abstract concepts; concrete ideas/examples are easier to remember.
Places are concrete. Neighbourhoods too, they evoke a personality and area. When we talk about big abstract goals, we could give names or focus in. Describing abstract ideas won’t be remembered. Concretising them will.
People will think differently depending on how things are. Students of biology will “try to remember whether reptiles lay eggs or not.” Teachers “think in terms of the grand system of animal taxonomy”. Experts have years of patterns and insights they’ve learned. Novices see concrete details as concrete details.1 It’s not dumbing things down, but if people make the effort to be concrete this will pay dividends. Speaking in a universal language.
Concreteness also makes targets transparent. Imagine designing a plane to be the “greatest in the world” versus a plane that could seat passengers, fly from , land on a short runway or difficult airport.
Footnotes
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Like math professors and teaching linear algebra. Where do the theorems come from? Well the students don’t need to know so they just exist as is. ↩