Explaining Difficult Things, page 2

For example, if you are writing instructions for using a complex machine, you probably need to answer the questions:

What is it used for?
How does it work?

You might also want to pose and answer other questions. For example, what does it look like?

At a more general level, information about everything in this wonderful universe of ours can be posed as a question.

Anything you can think to ask can also be answered, although the answers may not be very helpful. Pace to Douglas Adams, the answer to the question of the meaning of the universe may be 42 (and you don’t have to like it). The answer may also be ambiguous, or unknown; when proffered “I don’t know” is usually appropriate, or at least accurate.

Starting with the right questions, you can describe, or explain, just about anything.

If you are writing about a statue of a black bird, you probably want your readers to know:

What does it look like?
Why is it important or valuable?

Here’s Hammett’s initial description of the black bird (the Maltese falcon) in its original state:

[The Knights Templar] hit on the happy thought of sending...for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels....

When Sam Spade actually gets his hands on the bird in modern times, it is a different story:

When he had put the grey paper out of the way he had an egg-shaped mass of pale excelsior, wadded tight. His fingers tore the wad apart and then he had a foot-high figure of a bird, black as coal and shiny where its polish was not dulled by wood-dust and fragments of excelsior.

These descriptions are brief but evocative. After reading them, even if you’ve never seen the film version of The Maltese Falcon, you’ll have a pretty clear picture of the bird in your head and understand why it is valuable.

This chapter will help you learn to write descriptions and explanations that range over a wide variety of topics.

Continued next page

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