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Telling works: “For six months they spoke only about the children.” The sentence efficiently compresses a repeated relationship pattern.
8 Telling vs Showing Examples
Use these examples to study structure, specificity, tone, and variation. They are demonstrations—not claims about a real person or organization unless the example itself makes that explicit.
Before you copy
What to notice in the examples
Strong prose uses both modes deliberately. Showing earns space for emotionally important, uncertain, or interpretive moments; telling compresses routine actions, transitions, background, repeated behavior, and facts whose dramatization would slow the story without adding meaningful experience.
- Telling: state the fact, change, emotion, or passage of time directly.
- Showing: provide observable evidence and let the reader infer part of the meaning.
- Scene importance: decide how much narrative time the moment deserves.
- Reader task: decide whether inference or quick understanding better serves the passage.
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Showing works: Instead of “she distrusted him,” she places the signed contract back in her bag when he leaves the room to answer a call.
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Telling works: “By October, the repair shop had lost three mechanics and half its weekend customers.”
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Showing works: The manager reaches for a name on the shift board, stops, and erases another employee who quit that morning.
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Telling works between scenes: “The next two interviews produced the same polite rejection.”
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Showing works for the turning point: During the third interview, Ana realizes the panel is quoting lines from the anonymous complaint she submitted.
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Mixed mode: “He had avoided the hospital for years. Now, with the visitor badge sticking to his palm, he took the elevator to the sixth floor.”
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Mixed mode: “The town had changed quickly. The bakery was now a pharmacy, but the old bell still rang when Mara opened the door.”
Keep the underlying decision or pattern, then replace the subject, evidence, relationship, constraints, and tone with details that belong to your situation. If your final line still works after swapping only one noun, it may be too close to the example.