Language may be our most powerful tool. We use it to understand our world through listening and reading, and to communicate our own feelings, needs and desires through speaking and writing. With strong language skills, we have a much better chance of understanding and being understood, and of getting what we want and need from those around us.There are many ways to label or classify language as we learn to better control it—by levels, such as formal, informal, colloquial or slang; by tones, such as stiff, pompous, conversational, friendly, direct, impersonal; even by functions, such as noun, verb, adjective. I want to introduce you to a powerful way of classifying language—by levels of abstraction or concreteness or generality or specificity (any one of those four terms really implies the others).Approaching language in these terms is valuable because it helps us recognize what kinds of language are more likely to be understood and what kinds are more likely to be misunderstood. The more abstract or general your language is, the more unclear and boring it will be. The more concrete and specific your language is, the more clear and vivid it will be.