The Concrete Examples Technique: Why Abstract Ideas Only Stick When You Anchor Them | Chapterly Blog
The Concrete Examples Technique: Why Abstract Ideas Only Stick When You Anchor Them Quick Answer: The concrete examples technique is the practice of pairing every abstract idea you want to remember with at least one specific, concrete instance — ideally an instance from your own life. It is one of the ten study strategies evaluated by Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, and Willingham in their 2013 Psychological Science in the Public Interest review, and it received a "moderate" utility rating largely because it works and is easy to apply, but is underused. The mechanism is dual: concrete instances give abstract material a retrieval cue (you remember the story, the story pulls the principle up with it), and they force the deeper elaborative processing that produces durable memory in the first place. For nonfiction readers, the technique explains why a book packed with vivid case studies is remembered years later while a book of equally good ideas presented abstractly evaporates within weeks. The reading practice that follows is specific: for every load-bearing idea in a book, generate at least one concrete example — from the book if the author provided one, from your own life if they did not, and ideally both....