Ok, I can't seem to figure out how to make this work, and since I'm using ClassyPrelude (from classy-prelude, latest version on hackage as of yesterday), I think cafe is a better place to ask than beginners. Sorry if this should have gone there. I want to read in a list of files, concatenate them, and then run the resulting data through a "process" function. So far, no problem. Given an opts record that contains the list of files and some control for the process function, this expression works: hPut stdout =<< process opts . concat <$> mapM (readFile . fpFromString) (files opts) (BTW, recommendations on cleaning that up gratefully accepted) However, I'd like to be able to read them all as either Text or ByteString, depending on options being passed to me. This doesn't work so well. If I give process a type of Text -> Text or ByteString->ByteString, everything works fine with no other changes. However, any attempt to make it polymorphic fails with ambiguous type warnings. I've tried a slew of things, and found a few that work. But none of them are what I'd call good, much less elegant. Is there a good way to do this?