How to explain a complex topic simply: 7 techniques

To explain a complex topic simply, decide the one sentence you want people to remember, start from what they already know, connect the new idea to something familiar, give a concrete example, split the rest into three or four chunks, draw it while you talk, and finish with a question they answer from memory. None of these is a trick. Each one works around a known limit of how people take in new information, and each has research behind it.

1. Can you say it in one sentence?

Before you explain anything, finish this sentence:

After this, you’ll know that ______.

If you can’t, you aren’t ready to explain it yet, and no amount of polish will fix that. The sentence decides what goes in and, more importantly, what stays out. Interesting asides cost attention: one of Richard Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning, the coherence principle, is that people learn better when extraneous material is left out rather than included.

A good test: if a fact, story or caveat doesn’t help someone understand that one sentence, save it for a follow-up. If you are writing the explanation down as a script, our explainer script template starts from the same place.

2. Why do experts explain things badly?

Because of the curse of knowledge. The economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber named it in 1989: people who know more find it hard to set that knowledge aside, even when it would be in their interest to.

The most famous demonstration came a year later, in a Stanford study by Elizabeth Newton. One person tapped the rhythm of a well-known song on a table, and another tried to name the song. Tappers predicted that listeners would get about half of them. Listeners named 3 songs out of 120, or 2.5%. The tappers could hear the tune in their heads, and the listeners could only hear knocking.

Every expert explaining their field is a tapper. To get out of your own head:

• Explain it to one real beginner, and watch where they frown.
• List every term you use, then define each one before you use it, or drop it.
• Don’t skip the obvious step. It is obvious only to you.

3. How do analogies help?

An analogy borrows a structure people already understand. “A vaccine is a wanted poster for a germ” carries a whole set of relationships in a few words: the body is shown what the threat looks like, so it recognizes the real thing later.

But people don’t map analogies on their own. In Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak’s classic experiments, people read a story about a general who splits his army to attack a fortress from many roads at once, then tried to solve a medical puzzle: destroying a tumor with rays strong enough to harm the healthy tissue around it. With a hint to use the story, people tended to find the matching answer, several weaker rays aimed from different directions. Without the hint, far fewer did.

So spell the analogy out:

• Say what maps to what: the poster is the vaccine, the wanted criminal is the germ.
• Say where it breaks: unlike a poster, the immune system’s memory can fade, which is why some vaccines need boosters.
• Use the analogy before the technical term, not after it.

4. Why do concrete examples work?

Abstract ideas are hard to hold onto, and specific cases aren’t. In their review of six well-supported learning strategies, Yana Weinstein, Christopher Madan and Megan Sumeracki explain that concrete examples make ideas easier to understand and remember, and that information which is concrete and easy to picture is easier to learn, even when the topic itself is abstract.

They add a caution: an example that is too specific can stop people seeing the general idea, so give a few different ones. Instead of “compound interest grows exponentially”, say “$100 at 7% a year becomes about $200 in ten years and nearly $400 in twenty”, then add a second example from somewhere else, such as a debt that grows the same way.

5. How much can people take in at once?

Less than you would hope. Nelson Cowan’s review of working memory research puts the limit at about three to five meaningful chunks for young adults. Anything beyond that has to be grouped, or it falls out.

So chunk it:

• Split the topic into three or four parts, and say so at the start: “There are three steps.”
• Put each detail under the part it belongs to, not in one long list.
• Finish one chunk before you start the next, with a short pause between them.

6. Why draw while you talk?

People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone, which is the multimedia principle in Mayer’s work. Combining words with visuals, known as dual coding, is also one of the six strategies in Weinstein and colleagues’ review.

How you show the picture matters as well. In a 2023 experiment with 133 students, diagrams drawn progressively during the narration led to better recall and transfer than the same diagrams shown finished. Watching a picture being built lets people follow it one part at a time, instead of decoding the whole thing at once. There are more findings like this in why whiteboard videos work.

In practice:

• Draw each part as you name it, not before.
• Use arrows for relationships: causes, flows, before and after.
• Keep the drawings simple. A labeled box beats a detailed illustration nobody has time to read.

7. Why end with a question?

Because recalling an answer makes it stick far better than hearing it again. In Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke’s experiments, students who practiced recalling a passage remembered substantially more a week later than students who restudied it, even though restudying made students feel more confident.

So end with a question your listener can answer from what you just said, wait a moment, then give the answer in one line. “So why does a vaccine work before you ever catch the germ?” does more than “To sum up…”

How do you turn an explanation into a video?

Once an explanation works out loud, it makes a good short video, because each technique above maps onto a scene: the one sentence becomes the hook, each chunk gets a scene, each idea gets a drawing, and the question closes it. You can storyboard and draw it yourself, as in our guide to making a whiteboard animation video.

Or you can use Chasca. Type the topic along with your one-sentence takeaway, or drop in your notes, and it writes the script, splits it into scenes and draws each scene stroke by stroke in time with the narration, usually in about a minute. Then watch it the way a beginner would. If it slips into jargon, add “for a complete beginner” to your prompt and make it again; it takes about a minute. The examples page shows finished videos, and the pricing page shows the plans, including two free videos to start.

A checklist for your next explanation

• One sentence you want remembered.
• Every term defined, or cut.
• An analogy, mapped out loud, with its limits.
• Two or three concrete examples.
• Three or four chunks, announced at the start.
• A picture for each part, drawn as you name it.
• A question at the end, then the answer.

Sources

• Mayer, R. E. (2008). Applying the science of learning: Evidence-based principles for the design of multimedia instruction. American Psychologist, 63(8), 760–769.
• Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232–1254.
• Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, introduction (publisher’s sample, PDF). Describes Newton, E. L. (1990), The rocky road from actions to intentions, PhD dissertation, Stanford University.
• Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1980). Analogical problem solving. Cognitive Psychology, 12(3), 306–355.
• Weinstein, Y., Madan, C. R., & Sumeracki, M. A. (2018). Teaching the science of learning. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3, 2.
• Cowan, N. (2010). The magical mystery four: How is working memory capacity limited, and why? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(1), 51–57.
• Schneider, S., Krieglstein, F., Beege, M., & Rey, G. D. (2023). Successful learning with whiteboard animations: A question of their procedural character or narrative embedding? Heliyon.
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.