Register
One important quality of writing we are working to distinguish is the varieties of register in writing and/or reading. Register is a term used in musicology to mean a range of notes an instrument can play, except that here we are looking at register within language use, and especially within performances of writing and reading. For instance, the spectrum from the concrete to the abstract and all steps in between would constitute an "octave," and so would other registers that constantly are at play.
I suggest that the practice of distinguishing register at work in a given text would also allow us to distinguish how we project and perform with a particular register whenever we read or listen, and of course, write. I have adapted the following four registers (ranges) of language use from Tzvetan Todorov's Introduction to Poetics, pages 21-26:
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