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.
100% the right takeaway. Even if it's just a couple of sentences of encapsulating "what I'm going to talk about", that should always come before starting into a long backstory.
I read a lot of blogs that make that mistake of starting off a post by droning on for paragraphs about the background, history, or context they want to set for the blog — but I need to know why I'm here in the first place. The title got my attention, but it still doesn't totally tell me what I'll get out of this.
A 'history of a problem' section also has to try and be concise and use really engaging language (it's hard) otherwise those background intros can feel like a chore to read and people will leave.
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.
Consider that not all communication is about "getting ahead".
Also no, explaining things well is very difficult. Otherwise there wouldn't be so much bad explanatory writing out there. If you think it's easy, then you are either naturally skilled at it, or you are actually bad at it and don't realize.
>Consider that not all communication is about "getting ahead".
But you don't need to follow any advice if you do not seek to get ahead (i.e., better) in some sense. So, that doesn't make sense as a counterargument. OP's point is that you can become better at explaining, but that on its own does not add value. This is quite evident in scientific writing. Plenty of well-written papers are rejected if they do not provide sufficient value.
No, I'm not implying that. I'm saying that you do not need to heed to advice if you do not wish to become better, for whatever definition of better or 'getting ahead' you use. Saying that you don't want to get ahead is like a null statement. It doesn't add anything and is quite irrelevant to this discussion. It's like saying, "but I don't care; I'll do my own thing". You can say that for anything.
I think some people (like you) have opens minds, because they have realized that there is no point in insisting on wrong things, especially when those wrong things lead us to make wrong decisions.
You probably did not have any significant preexisting opinions about those subjects, then. When people already have an opinion about something, a mere explanation of a contrarian viewpoint will mostly accomplish nothing.
Of course, you might be the great exception, a perfectly reasoning actor, which we hear so much about in thought experiments.
> 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.
Can you give an example of writing that does this? Is it more about making declarations (with sources I hope) to nudge the reader to your beliefs? I'm not sure how you convince intelligent people without some explanations.
Mostly, convincing and explanations are mixed together. But some examples of convincing without any explanation is advertising, including “submarine” articles (as should be known to HN readers).
Examples of explanations without convincing can be found in most academic writing.
Your claim that explaining is mostly useless is a bafflingly terrible take. The video you linked is a well known video of someone explaining how to write well.
The video also starts with, and continues throughout with, explaining to people why their current writing style is bad, and why a new style is better. It happens to be a convincing explanation.
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.
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.
I'm OK with that up to a point because those who can have advantages over those who can't. I'm an engineer who writes well (mother was a PhD in English - could not escape it).
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.
If you can't get into the heads of those you are communicating with, you will mostly fail in your writing objectives. And this isn't simply what they are thinking now; it's meta-thinking and meta-meta-thinking as well as the environment (with resources available, rules and limitations, etc.) in which they information will be used.
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.
If you read and follow the strictures of Elements of Style, your writing is worse than not following it: awkward, stilted, self-conscious, clumsy. The authors did not follow their own advice in their own writing, and not even in that book itself. Its advice is presented and received as truth when it is merely opinion. Worse, people who have real power over you but are not writers will use its advice to evaluate your writing: editors, teachers, even actual judges.
But don't take my word for it. There are language and writing experts who are more articulate and detailed than I who can tell you:
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.
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.