Concreteness and imageability (writing rule)

What the rule is

Psycholinguistic norms rate words for how easy they are to experience with the senses (concreteness / imageability). The writing rule: prefer high-imageability, basic-level categories (thread, lock, pointer, stack frame) over superordinate fog (entity, mechanism, infrastructure), and cut stacked nominalizations.

What good looks like

  • Countable scenes: “three threads,” “one counter,” “two pointers.”

  • Nouns you could sketch.

  • Abstractions labels only after a concrete stand-in exists.

Failure modes for LLM writing

  • Thesaurus inflation (“utilize an orchestration substrate”).

  • Concrete nouns glued together without a scene (“thread heap pointer lifecycle”).

  • Fake concreteness via random numbers that do not track through the explanation.

Micro-example

Weak: “Contention on shared mutable state necessitates synchronization primitives.”

Stronger: “Two threads write the same counter. Without a rule for who goes first, the final number can be wrong. A lock or a compare-and-swap is that rule.”