This chapter presents a set of practical, classroom-tested exercises for teaching concept analysis, emphasizing how deliberate engagement with concepts improves research and communication. It outlines several strategies, including reconceptualizing familiar terms by identifying defining and elective attributes, and situating them within semantic fields. It highlights the heuristic power of Collier’s question, “What is that a case of?”, which prompts students to move from empirical examples to abstract categories. Taxonomy construction is another key tool, helping students systematize ideas across domains – from constitutions to cuisine – and understand how classification affects knowledge. Binary sorting (“There are two kinds of people…”) and genre-mapping (“What do you work on?”) also serve to stimulate reflection on research categories. The chapter argues for the pedagogical value of testing, suggesting that students benefit from identifying, defining, and illustrating core concepts as a way to internalize intellectual terrain. Field exams, concept glossaries, and vocabulary tests help solidify these connections. The chapter concludes with a case for “conceptualism” as a core scholarly orientation: Concepts allow generalization while grounding knowledge in empirical cases. Working with concepts is cognitively satisfying and essential for memory, communication, and cumulative learning – what more could a good course (or concept) hope to achieve?

Storytelling can be understood as a performative social event that instantiates a specific relationship between storyteller and audience. This relationship supports inferences of narrative causation in hearers, both locally (episode x caused episode y) and globally (repeated patterns of causation at a more abstract level). This applies to passages of performative speech in a narrative event that are non-narrative, such as description or digression. Scientific writing is often conceived as non-performative and impersonal, with causation expressed explicitly. However, I suggest in this chapter that discourse of this kind can make the task of configuring global patterns of causation more difficult. Performative narrative discourse, on the other hand, offers support for readers in the task of remodelling existing theoretical causal structures through reconceptualization. I illustrate this argument through an analysis of narrative and non-narrative performative discourse in the field of cognitive psychology.