A beginner's guide to explaining things
Estimated read time: 10 minutes
Estimated read time for entire branch: 120 minutes
When you try to explain something to someone, there are a lot of moving parts.
The goal of an explanation is to transfer understanding. There's some concept that makes sense to you—it holds together internally, and connects meaningfully to other pieces of knowledge—and you want that concept to make sense to the other person, as well.
In fact, the phrase "make sense" is a pretty accurate one. If you're explaining something well, you're making sense for the other person. You're taking things that would otherwise be confusing, disorganized, or incomplete, and laying them out in order such that the other person can understand them with minimal effort.
Explanations are at the core of what humans do best—they’re what enable us to know and understand far more than we could discover on our own. If you’re interested in sharing knowledge (or acquiring the knowledge of others), then you’re interested in a world where people are better at explaining.
This branch of Arbital was written to highlight some of the most common errors people make when trying to explain things, and to give you tools for noticing and correcting those errors. In addition to this basic overview, it includes a path detailing the core concepts underlying good explanations, a set of checklist questions for creating or improving your own tutorials and write-ups, an analysis of multiple high-quality examples, and a list of specific tools and tactics that will help take your explanations from good to great.
Good and bad explanations
Explanations don't exist in a vacuum—they're interactive. Every article or lecture or tutorial is meant to be absorbed by someone, and the best ones keep the audience front and center.
A good explanation is clear, complete, and concise. It uses the simplest possible language and draws the straightest possible path to its conclusion. It includes enough detail to cause the concept to hold together and connect to other concepts, but leaves out extraneous or unnecessary information.
Phrases like "simplest possible" and "enough detail" are tricky, though, and so the best explanations also embody a fourth quality—they're reflective, with both form and content tailored to meet the exact needs of their audiences. Just as there is no such thing as an "average" person, there are no concepts with universal explanations or explanations that work for everyone. The aptness of a given explanation is a function of the following:
It’s easiest to understand each of those qualities by looking at what happens when they are missing:
- Explanations can be confused or incomplete. They can skip over critical information, present details out of order, contain inaccuracies or contradictions, or just generally fail to hit the mark.
- Explanations can be rambling. They can spend more words than they need to, wasting the audience's time.
Explanations can fail to account for unique audience needs. They can ignore inferential gaps, make no effort to address different learning styles or connect to prior experience,
Explanations can be confused or incomplete. They can skip over critical information, present details out of order, contain inaccuracies or contradictions or unjustified assertions, or just generally fail to hit the mark.
- Explanations can be rambling. They can spend more words than they need to, wasting the audience’s time.
- Explanations can be untailored. They can be made without reference to their audience, ignoring inferential gaps and the need for differentiation, presenting their information in a one-size-fits-all sort of way that fails to accommodate the learner.
- Explanations can be unnecessary. They can address topics the audience has no interest in, or get lost in details that don't matter to the concept the audience wants to acquire, leaving the learner wondering "what's the point of all this?"
The most common cause of each of these problems is a failure to model the audience. A good explanation doesn’t end once the explainer has said all the things. It ends when the learner has understood the concept—no sooner, and definitely no later. The key question isn’t “What are all the important parts of this concept?” Instead, it’s “What’s the difference between someone who gets it and someone who doesn’t? How can I tell—objectively—whether or not the explanation has succeeded?”
If you’d like to dig deeper into the concepts behind understanding, take a look at the core concepts. If you’d like to see an algorithm for generating good explanations, check out step-by-step. If you’re interested in an analysis of a variety of good explanations, visit examples. If you’re just looking for quick, concrete next actions, go to tools and tactics.
- Who are you communicating with? How should your tone change, to match—should you be formal or informal, general or technical, elaborate or succinct? If you have to err in one direction or another, which is least likely to be problematic?
- Why is this information useful or valuable? Do you need to convince your audience of that value, as part of your explanation? How will awareness of this concept enrich their lives?
- What are the inferential gaps that you need to address? Are there conceptual leaps that are likely to generate confusion or opposition, and is there foundational information you could provide first, to make those leaps easier and more intuitive?
These questions don't necessarily require formal answers, but they inform everything about the structure and content of your explanation—they're "step zero" in figuring out how to explain a concept. For instance, this explanation is intended for Arbital users, so instead of being one long article, it's broken into distinct concepts, each of which is (hopefully) useful on its own. And since most Arbital users already understand the value of a good explanation, it's aimed mainly at clarifying the small missteps that keep good ones from being great.