A good nonfiction writer must grapple with the tension between the point they want to make and the need for examples, anecdotes, or case studies. Law students face the same issue in the classroom.
One of the biggest obstacles facing law students is the tension between cases and principles. Law professors struggle to cultivate in students a felt sense that all cases are gestures, failed or successful, to principles. Law students often trip on the myriad details in particular cases.
Practicing lawyers often do the same, only they can for example fool themselves into believing that they are being tested on how well they follow the most recent majority holding. The incentive of American judges is to think about ideas threading through many situations, rather than the myriad details of any particular litigation that comes before a court.
Likewise, a reader will evaluate the worthiness of a piece based on how it helps them understand things that matter or do things that matter. No case, no example, no anecdote, no case study, can bring about understanding except as a gesture to something larger. If you tell an anecdote by itself, then you’re gossiping. Accompany it with a lesson, and you’re a font of wisdom.
The worst offenders of the rule requiring examples might be philosophers, who for long stretches of text give no examples. The ones they give are very hypothetical, thin on detail and not concrete. This is possibly why philosophical writing is so frequently useless, not because it’s too abstract for others to understand, but because the authors got lost in their own abstractions.
The primary benefit of an example in writing is to keep the writer and the reader grounded in the real world. It is a feature, not a bug, of language fluency that its practitioners find pleasure in playing with the language itself. Poets and rappers do this with rhyme schemes. But the utility of language depends on how well it is connected to other real world events.
An example can never prove a point, even if the readers believe it did. An example helps explain a point, or fails to do so. The point is larger than the example, and going through every example to which the point applies would still not count as the point because nothing would thread all the examples together.
Selectivity of examples is an essential skill for a nonfiction writer. An example must help explain why an idea is the right one or why the alternatives are not as good. Therefore they should be as detailed as they need to be, but no more. An example should be concrete so the reader has to do less mental labor.
Fiction writing offers up a good comparison. Here “examples” are the beats in the story, which are expressions of a theme. If a bit of fiction writing is bad, it may be bad because there’s no coherent, compelling theme. But if the fiction is good it will have one.
In fiction writing the “principles” (themes) are, when done well, about emotion. The “examples” and “case studies” here can be idealized; fantastical; archetypal. They can be dramatized for the relevant theme because it is fundamentally emotional.
The norm of readership in fiction writing, and for consumption of fiction media generally, is to charitably suspend disbelief for every bit of logic other than emotional ones. A good reader with a background in armed combat will try to resume disbelief after reading an inaccurate description of a grenade going off, but will be judgmental about character motives.
There is a limit to the reader’s charity for fiction, and it does not have an analogue in nonfiction. The reader feels free, and should feel free, to be judgmental about any truth claim in the piece. If it’s there, it’s shark food.
Satires and parodies offer a border case, where the reader needs sophistication to understand the point, and evaluate the piece as a vehicle for the point. As with sarcasm, satires and parodies can be mistaken for fiction when they are not. Often bad fiction is a nonfiction writer’s attempt to shove principles into a story and pretend they are themes.
In nonfiction writing, examples, anecdotes, and case studies should:
- Be true
- Be concrete
- Be supportive to the point or inquiry, and
- Possess no more and no less detail than is necessary.
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