diff --git a/Doc/tutorial/inputoutput.rst b/Doc/tutorial/inputoutput.rst
index 4e27cff83ce..7f83c4d4612 100644
--- a/Doc/tutorial/inputoutput.rst
+++ b/Doc/tutorial/inputoutput.rst
@@ -480,7 +480,8 @@ If you have an object ``x``, you can view its JSON string representation with a
 simple line of code::
 
    >>> import json
-   >>> json.dumps([1, 'simple', 'list'])
+   >>> x = [1, 'simple', 'list']
+   >>> json.dumps(x)
    '[1, "simple", "list"]'
 
 Another variant of the :func:`~json.dumps` function, called :func:`~json.dump`,