Writing guide · 6 min read
Show vs. tell is the most repeated note in writing workshops. It is also one of the least explained. Here is what the measurable signals actually look like.
By Alyssa Glasco, Founder · Published
“Show, don’t tell” is the note every fiction writer hears earliest and understands last. It gets repeated in workshops, in craft books, in line edits, and almost never in a form you can act on. The reason is that it is not a rule. It is a tendency. Telling is efficient. Showing is immersive. You need both. The skill is choosing which one at which moment.
There is no metric that measures showing directly. What we can measure are the signals that correlate with it. A passage scoring low on adverbs, low on passive voice, high on lexical density, and low on abstract nouns tends to be doing more showing than telling. None of these prove the passage is working. They prove it is built on the kind of language that makes showing possible.
I tried to build a single showing score in early versions of the engine. It did not work. The patterns are real, but they only emerge across multiple metrics in combination, not in any single number. That is why the engine reports the constituent signals separately rather than collapsing them. Showing remains a craft skill. The engine can show you the language conditions under which it is possible.
Telling is a summary. It compresses time and information. A sentence like She had always been afraid of water is a tell. It delivers a fact quickly and moves on. That is the point.
Showing is rendered experience. It gives the reader something to watch. She stood at the edge of the pool and did not put her feet in is a show. It takes longer. It accomplishes the same thing by implication.
Both versions are correct for different jobs. The first one is the right choice if you need to get the fact onto the page and keep moving. The second is the right choice if the fear is what this scene is about. Deciding which you want is the craft.
An adverb modifying a weak verb almost always signals a place where a stronger verb would show more. Walked quickly is a tell. The adverb is telling the reader how to imagine the walk. Strode or rushed or hurried does the same work by showing what the walking looked like. The reader does less translating.
This is why adverb density correlates so strongly with telling. A draft full of adverbs is almost always a draft that has not yet reached for the verb that contains the modifier’s meaning already.
If you find yourself writing she felt sad, you are telling. The sentence names the feeling and leaves the reader with nothing to see. That is sometimes the right move, when you need the fact and no more. Usually it is the moment to stop and ask what sad looks like in her hands. How she is holding her coffee. What she is not saying. Whether she finishes a sentence or trails off.
Every named emotion in your draft is a place where showing was available and you chose efficiency. Sometimes that was the right choice. Audit the list anyway.
High passive voice often signals telling because passive constructions strip the actor from the sentence. A decision was made tells you something happened. She decided shows you who. Showing almost always requires agency, and passive voice removes it.
Low lexical density can also correlate with telling, because telling often relies on filler phrases that summarize rather than render: in a way that was, it was clear that, somehow. These are signals that the writer is describing the situation in the abstract rather than rendering it.
Abstract noun frequency is another one. Words like love, grief, anger, hope are concept names. A scene built on concept names is usually a scene that has not yet found its specific images. The showing version will trade most of the concept names for physical details that imply them.
Telling compresses time. If nothing important happens between two scenes, telling gets you across that gap without wasting the reader’s attention on stretches that do not earn their space.
Telling also delivers information the reader needs but that would take pages to render. Backstory, historical context, the mechanics of a world. A novel made of pure showing would become exhausting inside twenty pages. The purpose of telling is to let the showing work harder when it arrives.
The skill is not to eliminate telling. The skill is to notice when you are telling at a moment that wanted to be shown, and to reach for the verb, the image, the gesture that would render it instead.
Most writers believe they show more than they tell. The metrics almost always say otherwise. Adverb density is higher than you think. Named emotions outnumber rendered ones. The balance shifts slowly over months, not drafts, and the only way to see the shift is to watch the numbers over time.
Sign up free to track adverb density, passive voice, and lexical density across every exercise you submit. A six month trend will teach you more about your show-tell balance than any workshop note.