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.
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.