Humans love to know the how and why of things and that's why explanatory content is so popular. Let's take a look at the six traits of an effective explainer.
I create a lot of explainers: from nature interpretation (vultures!) to technology (digital phenotyping!) and health (flu!). So I spend a lot of time studying what makes the best ones work, and have a large library of examples ranging from blogs and infographics to interpretive signage to long-form pieces.
I recently added this one from the New York Times on the weapons of war. It's a terrific, if somewhat terrifying, explainer published during the first days of the U.S.-Iran war on Iran.
Here are six traits that made me like it, content notwithstanding:
- Voice & Tone: It sounds like a real person. Someone who knows their stuff and is more invested in us understanding than in their looking smart.
- Ideas & Details: The piece includes only the most important ideas and relevant details so we get the really useful bits without feeling more overwhelmed than thinking about bombs and other ordnance already makes us.
- Organization: The whole piece has a good flow and the repeated data categories for each entry creates a good logical framework. I also like the way author John Ismay starts with the weapon that was used first and then follows with others that were launched later.
- Sentence Fluency: The short sentences suit the format and keep readers from getting fatigued.
- Word Choice: Writing about complex weapons systems could be full of fancy jargon and argot (themselves somewhat fancy technical terms) that don't give us much information. But here, Ismay keeps it plain and clear so we stay engaged and build meaning.
- Formatting: The layout is clean and the text is easy to read.