There is almost nothing as metaphorically, if not physically, painful as watching two people who don’t know what they’re talking about try to explain something to each other. It’s as if the two come away from the encounter with less collective knowledge than they started with. Writing can be like that, sometimes: You have to write something you don’t know all that much about, for an audience that also doesn’t know. Often this involves scientific, technical, or otherwise esoteric subject matter. The prospect can be daunting, but with a bit of preparation, you can accomplish this task without looking like a total idiot, mystifying your audience, or boring them to tears.

Make Sure You Understand

You can’t very well explain something without understanding it yourself. Do your homework! Wikipedia is a good starting point, but it’s only that—you need to find a real expert to work with. Take lots of notes, ask lots of questions, and try to explain it back to that person. If possible, have that person, or another knowledgeable resource, look over your copy to make sure you have your facts straight.

Know Your Audience

Just how nontechnical are they? It’s a matter not just of profession, but of age, experience, social background, and more. You will write differently for an audience of fifth-graders than you will for college graduates. You want to make it simple enough to understand, but you don’t want to insult their intelligence. It’s a fine line, and you need to be mindful of it at all times.

Know Your Goal

What exactly are you trying to convey? Do you want your audience to be able to do something as a result of reading your work, or make a decision about something, or is it a general-interest piece? Each requires a different approach:

• If they need to be able to do something, then they need just enough information to understand why they are taking the actions, and they need to be amply warned against doing it incorrectly.
• For the decision-making audience, they need to know the various options and the pros and cons of each.
• General-interest writing is more expository—the challenge is to make it interesting to a lay audience. This type of writing typically needs some kind of a “Wow!” factor to keep readers engaged.

Use Analogies

Much technical material can be explained by using analogies. For example, to explain what goes on inside a nuclear reactor, you might use an analogy such as:

Imagine a pool table with clumps of marbles on it. Now a marble from one of the clumps breaks off at high speed, hitting another clump. That clump breaks up and its marbles go shooting off in all directions, bouncing off the sides, and hitting other clumps, which also break up. Every time a clump breaks up, it gives off energy in the form of heat. In a nuclear reactor, the “marbles” are neutrons, and the “clumps” are uranium atoms.

To a nuclear engineer, this description is not exactly right, and leaves out a lot of vital details, but this is probably good enough for your standard-issue middle schooler.

With analogies, it’s important to compare the technical concept you are trying to convey to something the audience is familiar with. Comparison to something equally arcane will not get you anywhere.

Explain the Terms, Lose the Jargon

Nothing will have your audience scrambling for the exits like having a lot of jargon and unexplained terminology. Don’t overwhelm your readers with many new terms all at once—spool them out in measured doses, defining them as they are introduced in ways readers will understand. Be especially careful with acronyms and abbreviations—a short piece, like this blog entry, shouldn’t have more than one or two, and make sure you explain it the first time you use it. After a couple of different abbreviations, readers lose track of which one means what.

Ready to take the plunge? Read some good examples first. Many newspapers have a regular “Science and Technology” feature, and the articles are usually good at striking that balance between too much tech talk and oversimplification. Other good examples include the For Dummies books. Get a feel for how these authors explain things. Keep a knowledgeable resource on speed dial, and you too can look like an expert without actually being one.

Morris Vaughan is a technical writing consultant in Los Angeles, California.