Explanatory Writing

The test of explanatory writing isn’t whether the reader understands what you said. It’s whether they can now think with the idea — apply it, extend it, use it to make decisions.

This is the difference between reading about compound interest and being able to spot it in disguise. Between nodding at “sunk cost fallacy” and catching yourself mid-mistake.

---

Great explanation is high-fidelity compression.

Compression: You reduce a messy domain into a smaller mental model the reader can hold. The world is too complex to reason about directly; you give them a simplification they can carry.

High-fidelity: The compression still cashes out. The model makes predictions, guides decisions, reveals what to notice. A false simplification is worse than no simplification — it gives confidence without capability.

The reader should feel smarter. They leave equipped with something they can use.

---

Five components recur across writers who pull this off:

1. A sharp question. Don’t start with content; start with the puzzle that forces structure. Feynman didn’t explain quantum electrodynamics — he explained why light behaves in ways that seem impossible. The question creates the need for the answer.

2. A governing model. A small set of principles that explains many things. First principles, incentives, evolution, energy constraints, cognitive biases. The model is what survives after the reader forgets the details.

3. Cognitive handholds. Concrete examples, analogies, thought experiments, crisp definitions. These are what the mind grips when the abstraction gets slippery. Einstein’s elevators. Dawkins’ selfish genes. Kahneman’s two systems.

4. Epistemic posture. How confident you are, what you admit you don’t know, how you treat counterarguments. This signals whether the reader should update their beliefs or just file information. Sagan: “Here’s what we know; here’s what we suspect; here’s what would change my mind.”

5. Edit-level craft. Sentence-by-sentence choices that reduce reader load. Short clauses, active voice, zero filler, deliberate rhythm. Every word either advances understanding or gets cut.

---

Different writers emphasize different components.

Feynman’s power is mechanism over labels. If an explanation is just a name, it doesn’t count. He shows the moving parts, points to what would falsify the claim, refuses to hide unknowns. He writes as if the reader will use the idea under pressure, not just nod at it.

Orwell treats clarity as ethics. Sloppy language enables sloppy thinking; vague phrases are political weapons. His famous rules — short words, cut words, avoid passive, avoid jargon — are moral prescriptions disguised as style advice.

Didion gets clarity through precision. She doesn’t compress by removing nuance; she compresses by removing imprecision. The sentence structure is how the meaning is framed.

Paul Graham writes to discover, then edits to communicate. Writing is a test harness for thought — you often find the real idea mid-draft. Default to spoken-language structure, then revise until it sounds like a real person.

Sagan balances wonder with skepticism. Awe without gullibility, skepticism without sneer. The reader feels safe asking basic questions.

Kahneman teaches by having the reader experience the failure mode. Micro-experiments that reveal cognitive machinery in fifteen seconds. You feel the bias before he names it.

---

Common failure modes:

Faking understanding. Using technical terms as explanations. “It works because of quantum tunneling” — but what is tunneling? Feynman’s test: can you explain it to a freshman?

Compressing too hard. Harari-style millennia-hopping that loses nuance. If you compress this hard, you must be explicit about uncertainty and contested claims.

Decorative metaphor. Metaphors that illustrate but don’t constrain. A good metaphor is a contract: it specifies where it applies and where it breaks.

No epistemic signal. Presenting contested claims with the same confidence as settled facts. The reader can’t calibrate how much to update.

Wall of text. Making the reader hold too much at once. Scott Alexander’s rule: never make the reader hold more than one new concept per paragraph.

---

The meta-skill is knowing which move a given explanation needs.

Sometimes the reader needs a governing model (they have details but no framework). Sometimes they need cognitive handholds (they have the framework but can’t apply it). Sometimes they need epistemic posture (they don’t know how much to trust what they’ve read elsewhere).

Diagnose first, then write.

Go Deeper

Books

• The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker — Cognitive science applied to prose. Why some sentences are clear and others aren’t.
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser — The classic on nonfiction craft. Warm, practical, short.
• The Elements of Style by Strunk & White — “Omit needless words” and 100 pages of what that means.

Essays

• “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell — Clarity as ethics.
• “Putting Ideas into Words” by Paul Graham — Writing as thinking.
• “The Cargo Cult Science” by Richard Feynman — Integrity as the foundation of explanation.

Related: [[compression]], [[epistemic-posture]], [[cognitive-handholds]], [[constraints]], [[tacit-knowledge]], [[craft]]