Explaining to non-specialists: cut detail, never cut conditions

Simplifying and distorting feel similar while you are doing them, and are entirely different to the person listening.

The line between them is simple: you may drop detail, but you may not drop conditions.

The rule

• Detail can go: sample sizes, instrument names, statistical machinery.
• Conditions cannot: who it applies to, in what circumstances.
• This method works and this method works for children under six are different claims.

Start with why it matters

• Non-specialists need the stake before the content.
• One sentence: what problem, whose problem.
• Then the finding, then how you know.

Use comparison, carefully

• Compare to something the listener already knows.
• Every analogy breaks somewhere — say where.
• One analogy per explanation, not several layered.

Numbers people can hold

• Relative and absolute effects give very different impressions.
• Give both when the difference matters.
• Use units the listener has intuition for.

Test it

• Explain it to someone outside the field and ask them to repeat it back.
• Where they get it wrong is where you were unclear.
• Not where they listened badly.

One thing worth remembering

Never drop the conditions when simplifying.

The shortened claim is the one that travels — into a press release, into a policy brief, into a headline — and a condition removed at the first retelling is gone from every retelling after it.

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