The Art of Explanation (book)
Explaining things is my job. A living hero of explanations is Lee Lefever, one of the founders of CommonCraft. They popularized the style of hand-drawn explainer videos, including ones about Twitter in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English and the entertaining Understanding Zombies.
He’s put together everything he’s learned about explaining things to people in a new book called The Art of Explanation. Serendipitously his cover design matches the cover for Mindfire.
I have a promotional copy and while I haven’t read it yet, I’m intrigued by the practical approach he’s taken with chapters like Why Explanations Fail, Stories vs. Facts and Simplification. It’s in my reading pile and when I get to I’ll be writing a review. Here’s the explainer video for the book itself:
You can buy The Art of Explanation or grab the sample chapter and more.
Just ordered it! Considering the amount of my time I spend explaining complicated shit to people, this should be a very useful read.
It’s also in my wishlist pile on amazon.com. i must say I was not entirely convinced by the preview, but I might throw it in the next batch now that you’ve mentioned it.