Explaining Difficult Things, page 9

Dividing and Conquering, continued

However, people from radically different societies do not share, employ, or believe in the same taxonomies and grammars.

To accurately describe concepts and objects, it is important that you place your subject in the context of a grammar and taxonomy that makes sense to your readers.

You need to understand the rules and relationships that govern your subject yourself. If these are potentially foreign to your readers, then you need to take time to carefully spell out this context but making the related grammars and taxonomies perfectly clear.

Circling a Subject

When you’re describing something, it’s important to provide the reader with many different views of your subject. I call this “circling.” Circling helps to give the reader a complete picture of your subject.

Depending on what you are describing, there may be many different interesting ways to view it. Here are some modes that are common to many subjects:

• Descriptive: a description of the thing

• Temporal: how it changes over time

• Conceptual: the concepts behind the object

Figure 2.3 shows these modes circling a subject.

Figure 2.3: Something can be described using descriptive, temporal, and conceptual modes.

Continued next page

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