Climbing the “Ladder of Abstraction” to Evoke Empathy
Ladder of Minimal Affect by Bill Smith. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
By Lauren Hodges
Conveying universal truths or evoking empathy is a difficult task in writing. Often these universal messages come across as cliche and many readers feel no emotion after reading hollow words or statistics on a page. An article posted on Nieman Storyboard explores a technique to combat this issue by employing the “ladder of abstraction”.
Empathy is created when a character (human or non-human) is made real to us. Therefore, it is important for readers to get to know a character so that they may feel their emotions and care about their struggles. The “ladder of abstraction” is a concept to help authors build upon their stories to create emotion – specifically empathy – for their readers.
The idea of the “ladder of abstraction” comes from S.I. Hayakawa’s book Language in Thought and Action. The ladder is constructed of more specific details at the bottom and then the universal and abstract messages at the top. In the middle of the ladder lies explanatory details, such as statistics, or details that are neither specific enough to be at the bottom nor general enough to be at the top.
As details become more specific, the character becomes a real person that readers can empathize with. The character’s story becomes more universal even if it is starkly different than anything the reader has experienced. While the specific details about a character are often revealed throughout the book, oftentimes the top of the ladder can only be seen when looking from above, after the reader has learned about the specifics of a character and their life.
The bottom of the ladder is important because without it the universal message may lack meaning, but without the top of the ladder readers are left wondering what the point of the details were. “Writing is more transportive, more powerful when a writer climbs up and down the ladder throughout a piece, pulling the reader in with specific, concrete details to build empathy for a character and then zooming out with abstract language to suggest its universal message.”
Bookmarked by Daniel Novta. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
The “ladder of abstraction” and similar rhetoric techniques are especially important when communicating large human or environmental disasters. This technique of including specific details to connect the reader helps move past hollow statistics. We often see this technique utilized in the form of narrative empathy when discussing things like genocide, mass casualties, or environmental catastrophes. This technique can also be applied to non-human characters, especially to animals with anthropomorphic features or behaviors.
By exploring these approaches to evoke compassion, we can teach future generations of journalists how to effectively write about overwhelmingly large events that are otherwise hard to communicate. Similarly, understanding how to connect compassionately with an audience can reveal to ourselves how we view and respond to the tragedies around us.