We have a lot of explaining to do

Every week, I run across ideas I’d love to share with people who have taken my writing workshops – or anyone interested in the challenges of writing for international organizations. Why not start a newsletter, I thought.

The timing is right, for two big reasons.‍

1. The international sector is under attack as never before, not just by Trump but by governments left and right that are cutting aid. Diminished public support for aid calls into question the way UN agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other global groups communicate (or don’t) with politicians and the public.

As Kevin Watkins put it in a blog post on May 21 about UK aid, “how do we reassert the case for an aid program grounded in values, solidarity, and multilateralism in an age marked by anxiety, nationalism, and extreme right-wing populism?”

Bijan Farnoudi, introducing Geneva’s new Coms Network on May 23, offered another take: “Our sector isn’t blameless. We’ve failed to convince leaders and the public that this work isn’t just charity – it’s enlightened self-interest.”

What does writing have to do with this? Everything. An enormous amount of what is published by international organizations is turned inwards. That’s why I started my workshops. The sector tends to write for itself, ignoring the need to engage crucial non-expert readers.‍

2. The trickle of artificial intelligence tools has turned into a torrent, offering writers a wealth of possibilities. I’ll explore how to take advantage of them while avoiding the traps.

Let’s put reason one and reason two, together, for example. Can AI help us do the explaining we need to do? Only if we recognize the need in the first place. (The lightbulb has to want to change.)

I am continually surprised by how often writers fail to explain technical terms, professional jargon, underlying assumptions and, more broadly, what their organization does. Why does it happen?‍

⌧ The audience is me. Writing about something complex brings to mind the other people who tackle the same subject. So you write for them (and yourself).‍

⌧ The “curse of knowledge”. Like the above but less conscious. We tend to assume that people know what we know.‍

⌧ The audience knows what I’m talking about. Not true. Those crucial readers you need to reach are not always experts: Donors, decision-makers, policy-makers, journalists and yes, voters too.‍

⌧ The either/or. Writers fear that to reach a general audience they have to abandon the experts. Not true.‍

⌧ The dumbing down: Writers fear that by using plain English they will appear less than smart or alienate specialist readers.

Two expressions seem to be triggers here: “plain English”and “simplify”. Academics and think tankers have told me they see plain English as a mere “comms tool” or a trap waiting to undermine their credibility. And“plain” has the pejorative sense of ordinary, boring, “plain vanilla”.

“Simplify” triggers the dumbing down fear. My ideas are complex, many writers assume, so I need complex language to express them. If I use simpler language, I will misrepresent my ideas.‍

How can we get out of this tangle – and what about the AI question? A few weeks ago, Google quietly announced a feature called Simplify, based on its Gemini AI tool. Highlight a paragraph of complex text, click the Simplify icon, and a “simplified” version of the text appears (only in the Google app for iPhone, so far). On its research blog, Google gives an example from a biomedical article:‍

Original‍

The complex pathology of this condition involves emphysematous destruction of lung parenchyma, diffuse interstitial fibrosis, changes in the composition of lung immune cells, increased production of immunomodulatory factors and the prominent remodeling of pulmonary vasculature.‍

Simplified‍

This complex condition involves damage to the lung tissue from emphysema, a disease that damages the air sacs in the lungs, and widespread scarring of the lung tissue, called fibrosis. The immune cells in the lungs change, and the body makes more immunomodulatory factors, substances that control the immune system. The blood vessels in the lungs also change a lot.

I’m highlighting this example not to recommend that you turn to AI henceforth for all your drafting and editing needs but because we can learn from it what to do ourselves. Keep the technical terms that you need, and explain them briefly the first time you use them. I wouldn’t call this simplifying. It’s explaining. It requires more words, but it’s much more reader-friendly.

It’s not a question of either/or (experts or non-experts). We need to write for both at the same time, and doing so isn’t dumbing down, it’s smarter. All it takes to escape the curse of knowledge is a little imagination: think of the crucial audience, those influential but non-specialist readers.

Hey Google, Simplify should be called Explain (and you’re rolling it out so slowly, you’ve got time to change the name). But whatever you call it, it’s a step ahead.

Here’s what happens when you try other AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Co-Pilot and Deepseek):

•  “simplify this paragraph”: they all turned it into a plain English version but left out the technical terms.

•  “explain this paragraph”: they all produced long bullet-point lists of long explanations

•  “revise this paragraph to explain the technical terms”: same as above or a long, hard-to-read sentence with long explanations in parentheses.

None of the three shortcuts in Apple’s in-text Writing Tools were adequate (make friendly, make professional, make concise). Opening the Writing Tools dialogue and entering “explain” produced a version that was excellent but too long (97 words).

***

Writers’ fear of explaining reminds me of the book that led the self-help boom back in the 90s, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. One day a customer walked into a bookshop where a friend of mine was working and said, “Do you have that book, what’s it called, Feel the Fear and Run Away”?

So, what’s it going to be? Feel the fear and paraphrase. We have a lot of explaining to do.