Show, don't tell, in practice

You have been told to show, not tell. Everyone has. It might be the most repeated piece of writing advice there is, and also the least useful, because almost nobody explains what it actually means or how to do it on a Tuesday night with a deadline coming.

So here it is, plainly. Telling is when you state the conclusion. Showing is when you give the reader what you saw and let them reach the conclusion themselves. "I was nervous before the interview" is telling: you have handed the reader a label and asked them to trust it. "I read the same text message four times in the waiting room and could not have told you what it said" is showing. Nobody had to be informed that you were nervous. They felt it, because they were given the evidence and trusted to join the dots.

Now the part the advice usually leaves out, which is that you should not show everything. An essay made entirely of scenes is exhausting, and some things simply need stating. "I trained before school for the next two years" is a perfectly good sentence; it does not need a montage. The craft is knowing which moments deserve the camera and which only need a caption. Show the moments that carry the meaning. Tell the plain connective tissue that moves you between them.

There is a reason this matters more than it used to. Ask a machine to write about a hard year and it tells, nearly every time, because telling is all it can do. It produces "this was a profoundly transformative period that taught me resilience", reaching straight for the conclusion, because it was never in the waiting room and never on the jetty and has no particular thing to show.

Showing is the one move it cannot make. It is, quite literally, the evidence that a person was there.