The Writing Company · with the Mayor

Write to Explain

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Write to Explain

When your purpose is to explain, you are giving your reader a tour. A good guide never skips a stop, and when the stops are causes and effects, never breaks the chain.

Every explanation is a trip you take your reader on. When you explain why something happens, the trip runs along a chain: each stop is caused by the one before it. Here is what a good one carries, and what each part does for the reader.

A clear destination

Your topic, in one sentence the reader cannot misunderstand. They should know exactly where this tour is going before it starts, and that a chain of cause and effect is how it gets there.
Stops in the right order

Your causes and effects, at least three, in the order that helps the reader most. In a cause-and-effect explanation the order is not a matter of taste: each effect becomes the cause of the next, so a good guide never doubles back.
What to notice at each stop

For each stop, one more line: name the cause, name the effect it produces, and make the link between them plain. The noticing is what makes it a chain and not a bare list.
An ending that leaves them knowing the way

Wrap it up and remind the reader of the whole chain, from the first cause to the last effect. They should walk away able to trace it themselves.

Spend your tools

The craft moves you already know still do the work, pointed at an explanation.

Nelson · Specific nouns

A noun names a person, a place, a thing, or an idea, and ideas can be named precisely too. "Things" says nothing. "The noise, the eye contact, and the boredom" names the abstract change exactly. Pin the idea down.

The ban changed things. The ban changed the noise, the eye contact, and the boredom.

Vinny · Strong verbs

A verb can hide the doer in the passive voice or put them on stage in the active voice. "Phones were collected" hides who did it; "a teacher collected our phones" shows the actor doing the work. Reach for the active voice unless you have a reason not to.

The phones were collected by a teacher each morning. Each morning, a teacher collected our phones.

Connie · Compound and complex sentences

A short sentence lands hard. A longer one that opens with a word like "when," or joins two thoughts with a comma and a conjunction, carries more. Model the comma before the conjunction; that is the rule. Mix the lengths, and your paragraph finds a shape.

The ban started. I hated it. Then I did not. When the ban started, I hated it, but by winter I had stopped noticing my empty pocket.

The Mayor · The three parts of a multi-paragraph piece

A single paragraph has three parts, and so does a whole piece. The opening sets the reader up, each body paragraph carries one point, and the close lands the whole thing. At this grade your writing grows past one paragraph, so the three parts grow with it.

One long paragraph that starts, wanders, and stops. An opening paragraph that sets it up, a body where each paragraph carries one point, and a closing paragraph that lands it.

The Explain Plan

Same three moves as always, new trip. When your purpose is to inform or to explain, the Plan it move is the Tour.

The Mayor's Power Plan

Pick it. Choose the idea worth explaining, and the reader who needs it.
Plan it. Map your stops before you go.
Pour it on. Write, and keep pouring: more detail at every stop the reader needs it.

The Tour

Plan the route, and the reader can follow it with their own two hands.

Name where we are going: your topic, in one sentence.
The stops, in order: your steps or facts, at least three.
What to notice at each stop: one more line for each.
Leave them knowing the way: an ending that hands over the skill.

Watch the Mayor plan it

Watch me run the plan on something our writer lived through last year: how a phone ban changes a school day, for a reader who thinks it would change nothing at all.

Pick it. How a phone ban changes a school day, explained as a chain of cause and effect. My reader is anyone who says "a rule about phones would not really change anything." I am writing this to show them the chain they are missing.

Plan it.

Where we are going A single rule, phones stay in lockers all day, sets off a chain of changes that reaches every corner of the school, and you can follow it stop by stop.
The stops, in order 1. Cause: phones go in lockers, so students have empty hands at lunch. 2. Effect becomes cause: with nothing to look at, more students talk, so the lunchroom gets louder. 3. Effect becomes cause: with people talking and glancing up, more eye contact happens, so the room feels more connected and, at first, more awkward. 4. Effect: the quiet spaces that phones used to fill come back, so boredom returns and, with it, actual conversation and daydreaming.
What to notice at each At stop one, the cause is small and the effect is only empty hands, nothing dramatic yet. At stop two, notice the word so: empty hands cause talking, talking causes noise. At stop three, name the awkwardness honestly, because a real chain does not pretend every effect is pleasant. At stop four, show that boredom is not the end of the chain but the start of something, daydreaming and talk.
Leave them knowing the way One rule, four links, and a lunchroom that sounds nothing like it did in August. Now you can trace the whole chain yourself, from the locker to the roar.

Pour it on. When I write this out, I keep the stops exactly and I add what the notes left out: the exact word that names each link, the so and the because that show cause leading to effect. But I never rearrange, because in a chain the order is the meaning. Move stop three ahead of stop two and the whole thing snaps.

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