Explain Important Concepts When Writing For Nonspecialist Readers

When writing for nonspecialists, be sure to clarify the important technical concepts in your text by using examples, analogies, visual aids, or other forms of verbal or visual illustration. Research by information theorists in the past few decades suggests that communication proceeds best when there is a fairly even balance between given information and new information. This is what you should strive for in your own writing. To do so, you must have some idea of who your readers are and what sort of background knowledge they have; as illustrated by the rock-climbing example, "givenness" and newness are partly functions of the knowledge a reader brings to a text this–and this can vary from reader to reader and text to text. To a rock climber, the sentence about big-wall Grade VIs would be perfectly comprehensible; to anyone else, it wouldn't be. Thus, if for some reason you had to communicate that kind of technical information to a nonspecialist reader, you would have to insert some background information more familiar to the reader to provide a proper framework for interpreting the new information. In so doing, you would be creating a better balance between given and new.

In technical writing, it frequently happens that the writer feels it necessary to introduce key concepts that may be unfamiliar to the reader. Sometimes these key concepts even occupy topic roles: topics of paragraphs, topics of sections, perhaps even the topic of the entire text. In general, it's important to define such concepts, not necessarily with a formal definition but rather with some kind of illustration. How is the concept used? What is it similar to? What does it look like? If technical terminology is used, what is a nontechnical way of saying more or less the same thing? Not only will answering such questions with the reader's needs in mind help the reader understand that particular concept but, more important—especially if the concept is a topical one—it will enrich and sharpen the reader's interpretation of the text as a whole. It will provide some of the given information that a specialist reader would automatically and implicitly associate with that particular concept but which a nonspecialist reader would not.

There are several ways to illustrate and explain unfamiliar concepts for the nonspecialist reader. Visual aids, of course, should be used whenever the concept is suited to visual representation. Often, however, a concept is too abstract to be represented visually. In such cases, specific examples of the concept are usually the most powerful means you can use to help the nonspecialist reader. Research by cognitive psychologists indicates that readers confronted with an unfamiliar abstract concept will often try to construct a concrete example they can relate to; in some cases, they will actually build a scenario with themselves as the principal actor acting out the concept. As a writer, you can sometimes save the reader this effort by providing an example, or even a scenario, yourself. This will also prevent the reader from constructing a misleading example or scenario. Analogies help explain an unfamiliar concept by showing that it is similar in certain ways to a familiar concept; they are useful in situations where the concept is so unfamiliar that you simply cannot think of any ordinary examples of it. Paraphrases, on the other hand, are useful in precisely the opposite situation: where the concept is familiar to the reader but only if restated in more recognizable terms. Paraphrases have a distinct advantage over examples and analogies in that they usually take up less space; sometimes even a one-word paraphrase will accomplish the purpose. Definitions, of course, are a familiar way of explicating new concepts. They can be combined with some of the techniques mentioned above to form extended definitions.

Here is an example of an extended definition, explaining what the technical term Remrak coefficient means:

The Remrak Coefficient:

The concept is not already familiar to the reader.
The information used to illustrate the concept is familiar to the reader.
The concept being illustrated is an important one in that particular context.
The information used to illustrate the concept focuses on features of that concept that are relevant to that particular context.