Explaining Difficult Things, page 10

Circling a Subject, continued

If circling sounds overly theoretical, don’t worry.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that you are having a conversation with the reader, albeit a one-sided conversation with a long time delay. Your descriptions should have a conversational flavor and feeling. If you were telling someone about your subject, what would you say?

Suppose your audience asked questions. By answering these questions, you are circling your subject.

Someone might want to know:

1. Why are you telling me about this?

2. Why is it important?

3. Why is it good (or bad)?

4. What will it do for me?

5. What does it do?

6. What does it look like?

7. How does it change over time?

8. How did you learn this?

9. How can I learn this?

10. How can I learn how to do this?

11. What are related objects, techniques, processes, and concepts?

12. What are the alternatives?

If you answer the questions from this twelve-point list that are relevant to your subject, you will have circled the subject. Your readers will appreciate the variety of viewpoints you have brought to the discussion.

Click here to practice circling a subject.

Style Matters

As your Mom might have said about neatness, style does matter!

Consider the following well-known example, written in intentionally bureaucratic style by George Orwell from his Politics and the English Language:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Sounds pretty long-winded and obscure, doesn’t it? What is Orwell trying to saying? (And, by the way, did your brain go dead after the fifth word? Mine did!)

Continued next page

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