Explaining to Different Audiences

The same explanation cannot serve a curious beginner and a seasoned expert. To the beginner, the expert version is a wall of unfamiliar words; to the expert, the beginner version is slow and slightly insulting. There is no single "clear" explanation of anything — only an explanation that fits this listener. Skilled explainers do not have one good version; they have the judgment to build the right one on demand.

That judgment turns on a single question you can ask before you say a word: what does this person already know? Get the starting point right and the rest almost writes itself. Get it wrong — start too high or too low — and no amount of eloquence recovers.

Start from what they already know

Good explanation is not poured into an empty vessel; it is attached to something already there. The educational psychologist David Ausubel put it plainly in 1968: the single most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows — find that out, and teach accordingly. Practically, this means opening from familiar ground: an analogy to something the listener uses daily, a fact they already accept, a problem they have felt. You then build outward from that anchor, one connected step at a time, rather than outward from the top of your own expertise.

Diagnose depth and vocabulary

Before choosing words, place the listener. A beginner needs the big shape, plain vocabulary, and a concrete example before any term is introduced. An intermediate knows the vocabulary and wants how the parts connect. An expert wants precision, edge cases, and what is genuinely new to them — and will resent being walked through basics. The costliest error is guessing wrong in silence, so the fastest diagnosis is simply to ask: "How familiar are you with this already?" Thirty seconds of asking saves ten minutes of aiming at the wrong target.

Check that it landed

An explanation is not finished when you stop talking; it is finished when they understand. Because of the curse of knowledge — once you know something, you cannot feel what not knowing is like — your sense that you were clear is unreliable. So check. Ask them to say it back in their own words, or to apply it to a new small case. A blank restatement or a wrong application is not failure; it is information telling you exactly where to rebuild.

A doctor must explain atrial fibrillation to two people. To a frightened patient: "Your heart has a natural rhythm, like a steady drumbeat. Right now the top chambers are quivering instead of beating cleanly, so the rhythm is irregular. That's what we're treating, and it's manageable." To a visiting medical student: the conduction pathways, the stroke-risk scoring, the rate-versus-rhythm control debate. Same condition, same doctor — two starting points, two vocabularies, two depths — because the listeners hold different prior knowledge and need different things.

Adapting to the audience is not telling them what they want to hear or softening what is true. A financial adviser who, sensing an optimistic client, quietly drops the discussion of risk has not adapted the explanation — he has corrupted it. Calibration changes the depth, vocabulary, and entry point of an explanation; it must never change its honest content. The beginner and the expert should walk away with the same true picture, arrived at by different roads.

A widely used shorthand for audience-fit explanation is ELI5 — "explain like I'm five." The phrase was popularised by the Reddit community r/explainlikeimfive, created in 2011, where people request plain-language accounts of complex topics. The community's own rules make a nuance worth noting: an ELI5 answer is meant to be friendly, simplified, and layperson-accessible — explicitly not an answer aimed at a literal five-year-old, and not dumbed down to the point of being wrong. In practice, then, ELI5 is a discipline of assuming little shared jargon and building from everyday experience, while keeping the content honest. It rhymes with a long-standing view in teaching, from Ausubel onward, that explanation should start from the listener's existing knowledge and extend it. As a popular convention it is a rule of thumb, not a proven method — but the instinct it encodes, meet the listener where they are, is well supported.

• "There's one clear explanation of any topic." Clarity is relative to a listener; the right version depends on who is in front of you.
• "Explaining simply means dumbing down." It means starting from shared ground and keeping the truth intact, not removing the truth.
• "If I was clear, they understood." The curse of knowledge makes your sense of clarity unreliable; only a check confirms it.
• "Experts want the beginner version, just faster." Experts want depth and precision, and resent being marched through basics they own.

Pick something you understand well. Write two explanations of it: one for a curious twelve-year-old, one for a knowledgeable peer. Force yourself to change three things between them — the opening analogy, the vocabulary, and the depth. Then write the one question you would ask each listener to check they actually got it. If your two versions differ only in tone, you have not adapted; you have merely re-decorated.

Think Like a Maester: Before you explain, find out what they already know — that single fact tells you where to start and how far to go.

1. Why is there no single "clear" explanation of a topic that works for everyone?
2. What did Ausubel identify as the most important factor influencing learning, and how do you act on it?
3. How do the needs of a beginner, an intermediate, and an expert differ?
4. What does the r/explainlikeimfive community clarify that ELI5 does not mean?
5. Why can't you trust your own feeling that an explanation was clear, and what should you do instead?

Explaining well is not delivering one polished account; it is building the right account for the listener in front of you. That starts with diagnosing what they already know and choosing a matching entry point, depth, and vocabulary — outward from their knowledge, not from your expertise. The ELI5 convention captures the instinct to meet people where they are while keeping the content honest, and Ausubel's principle gives it a foundation. Because the curse of knowledge fools you into feeling clear, the last step is always to check that the idea actually landed — and to rebuild from wherever it did not.

• Knowing Your Audience
• Teaching and Mentoring Others