The Data

Version 1: Quirky x Paragraphs

“Show, don’t tell” is less a rule than a lens. It’s about where you put the burden of meaning. Telling hands the reader a conclusion. Showing hands them evidence and lets their mind do the click. 🧠✨

Start by locating the abstraction. Words like angry, important, beautiful, traumatic, meaningful are summaries. They’re not wrong, they’re just late-stage thinking. To show, you rewind one step earlier, to the raw data that produced that conclusion in your own mind.

Instead of naming an emotion, describe what the body is doing. Muscles tightening, hands hovering with nothing to do, a jaw locked hard enough to ache later. Readers recognize feelings through physiology faster than labels because they’ve lived in bodies too. 🫀

Instead of praising or judging, present behavior under pressure. If someone is generous, show what they give up. If something matters, show the cost of ignoring it. Stakes reveal values the way gravity reveals mass. 🧲

A good test is the courtroom test. If your sentence sounds like a verdict, you’re probably telling. If it sounds like evidence, you’re probably showing. Verdicts close thought. Evidence invites it.

Another test is substitution.

Importantly, showing does not mean being cinematic or verbose. It means being selective. You choose the one or two details that carry disproportionate weight and let everything else fall away. Showing is compression, not expansion. 🪶

And finally, remember the point. Showing isn’t about withholding clarity. It’s about respecting the reader’s intelligence. You’re not being coy. You’re collaborating. You provide the spark. They complete the circuit. ⚡

Version 2: Quirky x Headings and Lists

“Show, don’t tell” isn’t a rule so much as a method for outsourcing meaning to the reader. You don’t announce conclusions. You supply evidence that lets the reader arrive there on their own. 🧠✨

Here’s how to actually enact it at the sentence and paragraph level.

1. Replace conclusions with observable data

Telling states an interpretation.
Showing presents what a camera, microphone, or thermometer could register.

Telling

She was nervous.

Showing

She folded the receipt into eighths, then unfolded it, then folded it again.

The second version never names the feeling. It creates conditions under which nervousness becomes the most economical inference.

Diagnostic question: Am I naming the meaning, or presenting the evidence that would cause someone to infer it?

2. Show behavior under pressure

Emotion reveals itself through deviation from baseline. What does the person do differently when something matters?

• Speed changes (rushing, stalling)
• Precision changes (fumbling, over-control)
• Attention narrows or scatters
• Habits intensify or collapse

Telling

He was angry.

Showing

He answered every question politely, carefully, and two seconds too late.

That “two seconds too late” does enormous work. ⏱️

3. Externalize the internal through objects

Objects are emotional proxies. People touch, fixate on, avoid, or misuse them.

Telling

She missed her father.

Showing

She kept his jacket on the back of the chair, never in the closet, never worn.

No abstraction. Just placement and restraint.

4. Let context do the talking

Often the strongest showing happens before the sentence you’re tempted to write.

Telling

This was a dangerous neighborhood.

Showing

The taxi driver waited until the light turned green, then told him to get out anyway.

The danger emerges from social knowledge, not description.

5. Use specificity instead of intensity

Vague intensity tells. Specific detail shows.

Telling

It was a beautiful meal.

Showing

The custard sagged when the spoon touched it, then recovered slowly, like memory.

Notice: fewer adjectives, more physics. 🍮

6. Trust the reader’s pattern-recognition

Telling is often a failure of nerve. Showing requires restraint.

If you’ve shown:

• a pattern of actions
• a repeated choice
• a meaningful omission

...you do not need to summarize.

Bad impulse:

He didn’t care about success anymore.

Better:

When the email came, he archived it without opening it.

Stop there. Let the silence land. 🎯

7. Know when telling is appropriate

“Telling” isn’t evil. It’s just high compression.

Use it when:

• Time must pass quickly
• Stakes are low
• Clarity matters more than texture

The craft move is choosing when to decompress meaning into scene.

A practical revision pass

When revising, highlight:

• Abstract nouns (love, fear, tension, beauty, failure)
• Psychological labels (angry, anxious, confident)

For each, ask:

What would someone do, notice, or avoid if this were true?

Rewrite using only those.

In short:
Showing is not about florid description.
It’s about presenting evidence and withdrawing your verdict.

You’re not telling the reader what to feel.
You’re giving them the raw data and letting their mind do the work. 🧩

Version 3: Nerdy x Headings and Lists

“Show, don’t tell” sounds mystical until you demystify it. It’s not a vibe. It’s a mechanical shift in where the meaning lives 🧠✨

Telling is when you do the reader’s thinking for them.
Showing is when you arrange evidence so the reader arrives at the thought themselves.

That’s the whole trick.

Here’s how to actually enact it, at sentence level.

First: stop naming inner states directly.
Words like angry, joyful, meaningful, heartbreaking, important, toxic, profound are shortcuts. They summarize an experience instead of staging it. When you use them, you’re announcing the verdict before the jury has seen the case.

Instead, ask: What would I have to notice for this word to feel unavoidable?

Not:

She was nervous.

But:

She reread the email for the fifth time, changed “Best” to “Thanks,” then back again.

Second: externalize the internal. Thoughts and feelings leave residue in the body and environment. Your job is to catch that residue.

Fear shows up as hesitation, narrowing choices, compulsive checking.
Love shows up as attention, time distortion, memory stickiness.
Power shows up as who interrupts whom, who waits, who apologizes first.

You’re not hiding emotion. You’re relocating it.

Third: choose details that force an inference.
Not all details show. Random detail is just clutter. Showing uses diagnostic detail.

Compare:

The apartment was depressing.

versus

A single spoon lay in the sink, crusted with oatmeal, though it was already evening.

That spoon isn’t decorative. It implies time passing, neglect, isolation. One detail, many conclusions. That’s efficiency ⚙️

Fourth: trust the reader’s pattern-recognition engine.
Humans are absurdly good at inference. When writers tell, it’s usually anxiety talking. Anxiety says: What if they don’t get it? So you underline. Then italicize. Then explain.

Showing requires a little nerve. You place the clues. You step back. You let silence do some work.

If you feel the urge to add a sentence that explains “what this means,” pause. Ask yourself whether the meaning is already implicit. If it is, delete the sentence and walk away slowly like an action hero 🔥

A useful test:
Highlight every adjective that names a judgment or emotion. For each one, ask, What would I have to show for this word to be unnecessary? Then try writing just that.

The paradox is that “show, don’t tell” isn’t about being indirect. It’s about being specific in the right dimension. Concrete beats abstract. Evidence beats verdicts. Scenes beat summaries.

When it works, the reader feels smart. And readers, like humans generally, love feeling smart 😌

Version 4: Nerdy x Paragraphs

“Show, don’t tell” sounds like a monk’s koan until you ground it in mechanics. The trick is to stop thinking of it as a moral commandment and start thinking of it as a transfer of evidence. You’re not withholding information. You’re changing the form in which it reaches the reader 🧠✨

Here’s the core idea: telling is when the writer does the interpretive work for the reader. Showing is when the writer supplies observable data and lets the reader’s mind do what it already loves doing... infer, judge, feel.

Take emotion.
Telling: “She was anxious.”
That’s a diagnosis. You’ve jumped straight to the conclusion.

Showing means asking, what would anxiety do in a body, in a room, in time? Maybe her foot keeps tapping. Maybe she rereads the same email subject line three times without opening it. Maybe she arrives early and still apologizes for being late. None of those say “anxious,” but the reader’s pattern-recognition engine fires anyway. They feel clever. They feel it.

Ask instead: what is the person doing, what are they not doing, what changes in the space because they’re there? Behavior is evidence. So are constraints. So is friction.

Another lever is specificity. The human brain is lazy in a wonderful way. Give it a concrete detail and it will build the rest of the world for you. “He was poor” is a summary. “He kept the heat off and wore a wool hat indoors” is a scene. The second one activates sensation, memory, judgment, and emotion all at once. You didn’t say “poor.” You let the reader discover it and discovery sticks harder than assertion 🔍

Dialogue is a stealth showing machine. People almost never say what they mean directly, especially when stakes are high. When someone says, “Do whatever you want,” the content is trivial, but the subtext is doing all the work. Showing lives in that gap between what’s said and what’s meant.

Here’s a practical revision move you can actually use tomorrow. Circle every adjective and abstract noun in a paragraph. Not to delete them automatically, but to interrogate them. Ask: if I weren’t allowed to use this word, what would I have to show instead? What would change in the physical world? What would a camera capture? What would a stranger notice?

One last reframe that writers find liberating: showing is not about being coy or withholding. It’s about trust. You’re trusting the reader’s intelligence and emotional equipment. You’re saying, I’ll give you the clues, you build the meaning. And readers love that. It turns reading from passive consumption into collaboration 🤝

If you want to go even deeper, the next frontier is learning when not to show. Sometimes telling is faster, kinder, or structurally necessary. Mastery is knowing the difference and choosing deliberately.

And for comparison...