Teaching writing using the ladder of abstraction.

In my last two blog posts, I wrote about the ladder of abstraction and (a) its application to disciplinary literacy and (b) responding to literature. In this short blog, I want a look a little closer at how we can use the ladder to improve the depth of a student’s writing. The ideas here derive from a number of sources, but the main influences are:

• Marcia Seabury’s ‘The Abstraction Ladder in Freshman Composition’ (1989) and ‘Critical Thinking via the Abstraction Ladder’ (1991).
• Jack Hart’s ‘The Ladder of Abstraction’ (1994).
• Marna Broekhoff’s ‘‘Downshifting’: A Visual Techniques for Teaching Paragraph Development’ (2003)

Broekhoff’s article is a practical guide to teaching students how to move along the ladder, from the general to the specific. “Too often”, she says, “students write ‘paragraphs’ of only one sentence, or of multiple but only loosely related sentences. We urge them to write a more general topic sentence and more specific supporting details, but what does this mean?” (Broekhoff, 2003: 44).

Broekhoff begins by getting students to distinguish between the notion of ‘general’ and ‘specific’, and she does this by showing them pairs of words and asking whether the words in these pairs are general, specific, or equal. I have adapted her idea in the table below

And so: season = general, summer = specific; clues = general,  fingerprints = specific; several and many are equally general; Wales and England are both ‘general’, but United Kingdom is general and so Scotland is relatively specific; cow = specific, herd = general; government = general, but democracy, as a form of government, is specific; school = specific and education is general.

Next, we introduce the ladder of abstraction (find more about this here). You can ask students to work with the ladder of abstraction by taking one or two of these pairings and extending the ideas to move up and down the rungs. For example:

Once we’ve established the principles of moving from the general to the specific, we can look at pairs of sentences, as follows:

1. One of the main causes is the over-consumption of fast food.
2. The cause of poor health in this country can be traced to many factors.

1. The school has introduced significant changes to school policies.
2. It is the introduction of a new uniform that has created most debate.

x) The fashion industry is under fire for its failure to regulate exploitative working conditions.

y) There are particular concerns regarding the employment of young children in so called ‘sweat- shops’.

Not only does this exercise encourage students to think about how to move from the general to the specific, but it also helps them to see how sentences are bound together. By breaking sentences into topics and comments (topic = the jumping off point of the sentence and comment is the information that completes the sentence). For example:

We can teach students how sentences are bound together to ensure cohesion and coherence. In this example, the topic of ‘poor health’ is commented on in the second part of the sentence. Then, the ‘many factors’ in the second half of the sentence is picked up in the first part of the second sentence which drills down in a little more detail. So: ‘many factors’ becomes ‘one of the main causes’. Because we have already talked about the difference between generality and specificity, we can now attempt to explain clearly why this connection works.

We can do the same with the other pairs of sentences:

We can now help our students develop their writing by adding another sentence to each of our pairs. In order for our paragraph to be more developed, it is important that this next sentence is equal to or even more specific in relation to our more generalised topic sentence.

Let’s look at the first two sentences again:

[1] The cause of poor health in this country can be traced to many factors. [2] One of the main causes is the over-consumption of fast food.

And here are a further two sentences that we might add to the paragraph. Can you decide which are ‘equal’ to the sentence [2] and which is even more ‘specific’?

[a] Another of the key causes is a lack of exercise.

[b] It is thought that most people in the UK consume twice as much fast food per week than is recommended.

Sentence [a] of course is equal to sentence [2] because it doesn’t build on the idea of fast food. Sentence [b] does – it adds a simple statistic to develop the point – it is more specific.

Either of these would be acceptable additions to the paragraph:

Example A	[1] The cause of poor health in this country can be traced to many factors. [2] One of the main causes is the over-consumption of fast food. [3] Another of the key causes is a lack of exercise.
Example B	[1] The cause of poor health in this country can be traced to many factors. [2] One of the main causes is the over-consumption of fast food. [3] It is thought that most people in the UK consume twice as much fast food per week than is recommended.

We can see how we can begin to develop more detailed paragraphs by thinking about the ladder of abstraction. However, Example B feels as if it is on the way to being more substantial whilst Example A will need, as some point, to pick up each of these points and develop them with more specificity.

We could go on, but the point is that by using the ladder of abstraction, and thinking about levels of generality and specificity, we can start to build more detail into our paragraphs. Rather than add comments to students’ work such as ‘you need more detail’, we can now point to particular sentences and ask them to think about how they might use the concept of ‘general/specific’ to build more sustained paragraphs.

We can build students’ confidence by looking at paragraphs that have been jumbled up and asking them to re-order them according to their level of generality. I have adapted a paragraph from Broekhoff below.

SN	(sentence number)
1	Furthermore, he now earns more money.
2	To begin with, he now has more free time.
3	There are several reasons why Jake likes his new job.
4	Specifically, he goes to work later in the morning and gets home earlier in the evening.
5	For instance, the skills that he is learning will help him to qualify for a much higher-paying position.
6	Above all, he now has a better chance for promotion.
7	To be specific, his weekly wage has increased from £150 to £200.

Below are the sentences in the correct order. The key is

• SN = sentence number
• Yellow arrows join the topic sentence (which is at generality level 1) to those sentences which are at generality level 2 (SN2, SN1, and SN6). Notice that these constitute three separate points which help develop the ideas in the main topic sentence.
• Blue arrows show the development of sentences from generality level 2 to generality level 3. Notice these add further detail to each of the three ideas within the paragraph.

Okay. Now for a bit of hard thinking!

• Obviously, SN3 is the most general (1) and it is therefore appropriate to place this at the top of the paragraph (a topic sentence).
• SN2 signposts itself at the next level of generality (2) by the adverbial phrase which acts as a conjunction (‘to begin with’)
• SN4, with the use of the phrase ‘specifically, he’ is at level 3 (the word ‘specifically’ helps!) . In addition, the comment ‘he now has more free time’ also links to the comment for SN2 with its reference to time
• SN1 returns us to generality level 2. It doesn’t add any more detail to SN4 – instead it adds a second topic. (wages/money). This is signalled by the phrase ‘furthermore, he’.
• SN7 is at level 3, building as it does on the topic of money in SN1.
• SN6 goes back to generality level 2 because it is adding a second reason to develop the topic heading in SN3.
• Finally, SN5 is at generality level 3:  this builds on the topic of SN6. In addition, the comment ‘is learning will help him to qualify for a much higher-paying position’ links back to the comment in SN6 (‘has a better chance of promotion’).

The paragraph contains some good ideas. There are some grammatical errors but the main problem is that it’s not as cohesive as it could be. My advice to the student would be to re-order these sentences so that the one that is most general/abstract goes at the top of the paragraph, then the next and the next in order of generality.

It should look like this (I’ve added a connecting phrase ‘in poorer countries’ to aid cohesion):

Notice that, apart from the additional connecting phrase, I have not added anything to the writing. These are the same sentences, but in a different order. And yet, the writing is clearer, more coherent, and sentences link together more cohesively.

What have we learnt from this?

1. Use the ladder of abstraction to help you develop ideas from the generality of topic sentences to the specifics of examples.
2. Make sure that sentences link cohesively. Check that the sentence you are writing builds on/connects to a previous sentence.