Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing

I like this post. I think it has an important overarching lesson, which is that when you're explaining something that's complicated, it's critical that the structure of the exposition itself is straightforward, that way there's only one complicated thing in the room.

One concrete takeaway for me is: I often lead with the history of a problem in order to give it some gravitas, but maybe I'll try the advice of swapping the order up, and starting with the concrete thing of what it is we're going to accomplish.

Not bad, but it's fairly standard advice. Basically, anyone that has written a scientific paper or pitch proposal has done this kind of thing.

I like to inject humor and write in the vernacular[0]. Doesn't always win me friends, but folks seem to like it, for the most part.

I'm not big on "hard and fast rules." I find things like passive voice can actually be the best thing, in places.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

I believe that the most important thing is to put yourself in the shoes of your audience.

There is, unfortunately, no single best explanation for all audiences.

It all depends on the expertise, experience, level of English/other language of the audience.

For example, when teaching programming to students who have a solid background in math, it is quite easy to teach functions and recursion in an abstract manner. Students familiar with the Cartesian plane will find it nice to get started programming by doing graphics programming.

Explaining things is not that hard, and if you’re bad at it, you can get better with practice and by learning a few tricks. But explaining is mostly useless in the real world. What will get you ahead is, instead, the ability to be convincing. That is, to pry people loose from their existing beliefs, and nudge them to adopt beliefs of your choosing. This, perhaps surprisingly, does not involve explaining your beliefs and hoping other people see the error of their ways. People don’t work like that.

Also, the three-step structure he advocates is a bad idea, as described here (IIRC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

While I do believe that explanatory writing has its place in the world, I think it's too easy for people to make the mental jump that the better they are at explaining something, the more it will resonate with the audience they're speaking to.

At the end of the day, humans are emotional beings first and thinking beings second. Explanatory writing speaks to the latter. Meanwhile stories connect with our basest programming, thanks to the ability to evoke emotion (when written well, of course).

If writing to persuade: yes, the writing needs to be clear and succinctly relay information. But most importantly, it needs to speak to our deepest emotions and desires. When an audience is made to feel differently, they think differently too.

Great post. It has anything from low-level mechanical to high-level styling tips. There's another major factor that sometimes separates good and bad explanatory writing for me, and that's overcoming author's own "curse of knowledge"[1]. If author is fully aware of what's likely unknown to the reader and controls the flow of information explaining the unknowns one at a time, the article becomes a lot more digestible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Pretty good exposition of the classic essay / sandwich style. I've learned that there probably isn't any new advice to help people write, but the opportunity is in teaching them how to edit. Nobody writes well, only more or less based on the quality of their thinking. The difference is in how well we edit.

The divisions between expository, persuasive, argumentative, etc, essay styles tend to blend together when done well.

One important thing missing is that "explaining things" requires empathizing with your audience, and providing context that will be meaningful to that audience.

For example, think this is kind of missing the point:

> Simply tell people you’re going to teach them how to wash their clothes.

That recommendation will be valid for some audiences some of the time.

Some people want to read about the history of fabric softeners. Some people won't understand why washing clothes is important and need to have the "why" before their ape brains can focus on the "how". Some people are just there because they have to be there and are going to be hard to reach, and you might have to get creative in order to make the material seem relevant to them. Explaining things is not a one-size-fits-all process.

People seem to need some kind of personal connection to the content, and some motivation to care about it, before they can understand it. That's the point of getting readers "hooked", as the author says. But the mechanisms for "hooking" will necessarily vary depending on who the reader is.

People also need to make relatively small logical connections. The process of learning and understanding is generally incremental. Once in a while, when learning something, the learner has a flash of great understanding, but those moments are rare relative to learning one small fact at a time. And usually those great moments of understanding only happen when the learner first accumulates many many small bits of understanding first.

A learner who is personally connected to the material they are learning will have an easier time transitioning into learning it, because the subject is smaller smaller leap away from what they already know/understand.

Therefore the author I think has the right idea and clearly has a reliable formula, but they don't understand why their own formula works!

The author has found that telling stories is a great way to get people interested in the material. That's not because stories are a magic explanation bullet. It's because, for the audience that they generally write for, stories are a great way to provide context and a basis of intuition for the material. Having context and the basis of intuition brings the audiences closer to understanding the material, which eases the transition into the more technical or complicated parts of the explanation.

So yes, most people respond well to stories. But figuring out what story to tell it can be challenging.

To explain something truly well, you need to know the motivations and and pre-existing knowledge of your audience. You need to bring your material to where the audience is at, or at least make a connection from your material to there.

I think there are a lot of other small aspects here as well, having to do with the way individual small pieces of information or structured, how to build ideas, when to challenge the learner and when to assist them, etc. but I've already written way too much in this post.

TLDR :

* Use a structure of "what I'll explain, explanation, what I explained" (aka intro, body, conclusion)

* use concrete examples instead of starting off abstract

* write well

Pretty underwhelming list tbh. There are many more small tips I'd personally include. But, what this does have is still agreeable.

This is pretty much the same philosophy behind writing effective peer-reviewed research publications in the scientific community. Not novel, but an excellent short and sweet post to put beginners in the right mindset.

I really wish people would stop recommending Elements of Style

The advice is obvious to people who do a lot of blogging, but there's always someone learning who needs a resource like this to help them build their foundation.