There are tricks to explaining complex ideas in prose, but the most important skill is holistic: adopting a mindset for evaluating the cognitive load of your sentences and the mental capacity of your audience.
Good writers get out of their own heads and think about how their words land. You need a mental model of your reader in the room with you as you write.
The skills come through practice. I developed as a science writer during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when I was a daily newspaper reporter. I loved the challenge of conveying science to non-scientists, and that has been a specialty of mine since.
In my last newsletter, I wrote about the need of politicians to address the 54 percent of Americans who read at the sixth-grade level or below. My own writing is usually intended for readers with a higher level of understanding, but even well-educated people need help.
I’ve attended seminars in which PhD scientists in the same field had trouble understanding one another. Using language to get a complex thought from your head to another person’s is hard.
The first step is to decide if explaining a complex idea is necessary.
Inspect the audience member floating above you in the room: if she already understands your idea, or if it is somehow adjacent to commonplace knowledge, you can bring your idea into the text by reference or metaphor without the confusion or tedium of a full explanation.
Few ideas are truly novel. Usually, what seems new lies near a familiar mental pathway.
The deeper you go beyond those paths, the more cognitive work you must ask of your reader. To compensate, reduce the effort of reading. Short, clear sentences are the easiest kind to understand. Use them. (Or don’t: here are some good exceptions.)
Another way to ease the cognitive load is by helping the reader organize his thoughts.
Give a subtle warning that something difficult but important is coming. Frame it, setting up the reason why it matters and gesturing to the conclusion coming on the far side of the explanation. Now that the reader knows the ground, place the first stones—those short, declarative sentences—that will form the foundation of the idea you will be constructing.
Incidentally (and for another newsletter), this all works in the opposite direction, too: on other occasions, you can use complex sentences and multi-dimensional metaphors to flood the reader’s cognitive space, when your goal is to convey a sense of grandeur or spiritual elevation that elides concrete understanding.
In any case, the key is your mental model of that audience member whose mind you are playing with. You must have a theory about your reader’s intelligence and education, cultural background, level of interest in the material, and reason for picking it up.
Figuring out the audience is the first conversation I have with clients. It’s not, “Why are you writing this?” It is, “Who are you writing this for?”
All your efforts should be for the benefit of the reader. By so conceiving your work, you help yourself.
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