Concrete Nouns Beat Abstract Ones: Proof From Real Pages

I audit websites for a living, in a sense: I built a tool that does it, and I read a lot of its output. After enough of these, you start noticing that clarity problems cluster around a single grammatical habit. The pages that confuse people are built out of abstract nouns. The pages that don’t are built out of concrete ones.

An abstract noun is a word for something you can’t picture. Solution. Platform. Workflow. Experience. Optimization. Ecosystem. A concrete noun is a word for something you can. Invoice. Photo. Spreadsheet. Delivery truck. Blood test. When you read a concrete noun, an image appears in your head without any effort on your part. When you read an abstract one, nothing appears, and your brain has to go looking. That lookup takes time and, worse, it can fail. If I read “we streamline your workflows,” I have to guess which workflows, streamlined how. If I read “we turn your bank statements into tax-ready spreadsheets,” I don’t guess at all. The sentence did the work.

Here’s a composite of a headline pattern I see weekly, changed enough that it’s nobody in particular: “Empowering teams with intelligent solutions for the modern enterprise.” Read it slowly. Which teams? Solutions to what? Intelligent how? Every noun in that sentence is a placeholder waiting for a real word. The company that wrote it sells, as it turns out, scheduling software for hospital nurses. “Scheduling software for hospital nurses” contains three concrete nouns and would be understood by a stranger in about a second. The abstract version is understood by nobody, ever, including, I suspect, the people who wrote it.

Why do smart people write this way? I think there are two reasons, and they’re both understandable. The first is fear of excluding customers. If you say “for hospital nurses,” you worry you’re turning away the clinic managers. So you retreat up the ladder of abstraction until the words include everyone, at which point they describe no one. But specificity doesn’t repel adjacent customers the way people fear. A clinic manager who reads “scheduling software for hospital nurses” thinks “that’s close to my problem, I’ll look.” A clinic manager who reads “intelligent solutions” thinks nothing, because there’s nothing to think.

The second reason is that abstraction feels senior. Concrete words feel small. “We fix invoices” sounds like a shop; “we transform financial operations” sounds like a company that could go public. But the reader’s brain doesn’t award points for sounding big. It awards points for being understood, and it awards them instantly or not at all. In the audits I read, the pages that score worst on clarity are almost never small companies talking plainly. They’re companies of every size talking grandly.

There’s a mechanical way to check yourself, and it’s the one I find most useful. Take your headline and count the nouns you could photograph. Not metaphorically photograph, literally: could you point a camera at this thing? You can photograph an invoice, a nurse, a schedule on a wall. You cannot photograph a solution, an experience, or an ecosystem. If your headline contains zero photographable nouns, it’s very likely a stranger can’t tell what you do. This isn’t a style preference. It’s closer to physics. Comprehension speed tracks concreteness, and a homepage headline is read at the speed of a glance.

The objection I hear is that some products genuinely are abstract. Middleware. Compliance tooling. Infrastructure. Fair. But even abstract products have concrete inputs and outputs, and that’s where the concrete nouns live. Nobody buys “observability”; they buy knowing which server crashed at 3 a.m. Nobody buys “compliance automation”; they buy passing the audit without a month of screenshots. Describe the input and the output in photographable words and the abstraction in the middle takes care of itself. The customer already knows their own workflow is complicated. They don’t need you to say “workflow.” They need you to name the artifact at the end of it.

When my tool flags a clarity problem, the remedy it prescribes is usually some version of this substitution: replace the category word with the thing itself. Not “content” but “product photos.” Not “stakeholders” but “your accountant.” Not “insights” but “a list of the pages losing you customers.” Each substitution makes the sentence longer in characters and shorter in comprehension time, which is the trade you always want on a homepage.

Plain, concrete language is sometimes mistaken for a lack of ambition. I’d argue the opposite. It takes confidence to say exactly what you do, because exact words can be judged. Abstractions are a hedge. A hedge is a way of not being wrong, and on a homepage, not being wrong is not enough. You have to be understood, and understanding travels through nouns you can see.