By Richard Flockemann, Research and Reporting, BrightGuide Africa

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In our monthly newsletter, we’re running a Q&A for communications professionals, where we help our readers solve their most vexatious comms issues. Anything from strategy to messaging to tactics to internal politics to team dynamics. This month, a reader asked us about my speciality — turning complex or dense information into something accessible and memorable. Here’s what I said.

Q: I’m a new comms officer for an international development project about farming and climate change. Part of my job is working with academics and experts to write blogs about what we do. But I don’t know much about climate-smart agriculture and I’m finding to hard to understand the writing the experts are giving me! How do turn technical material into something readable?

A: “While this is definitely one of the scarier elements of working in comms roles like this, it’s important to recognise that it’s also a great opportunity. Not only for you to learn a bit about something new, but also for you to use your perspective as an outsider to the project’s advantage. A lot of the time, outsiders have an easier time of placing themselves in their audience’s shoes than experts will – which can really improve the quality of the writing.

Here’s three tips for turning technical and dense information that you haven’t entirely mastered yourself into something that will delight your audience!

Tip 1: Don’t worry about trying to seem clever

When feeling out of your depth, it can be tempting to worry about coming across like you’re a fraud. This can encourage you to reach for the more obscure corners of your vocabulary, and use more jargony shorthand.

But writing like this makes your audience feel intimidated and excluded. Instead of worrying about whether readers think you’re clever, you should be trying to make readers feel clever.

That means giving them a sense of mastery of what you’re saying. And that involves using ordinary language, tying your piece of writing to their perspective, and focussing only on what’s most important from them to know.

Tip 2: Get clear on the big picture

Big pictures are always much easier to get your head around than the details. Why does this project exist? What is for? There is always a simple answer to that question, no matter what the details are. Once you’ve got that clear in your head, think about what the activities you’re describing are for. Why is the project doing this thing I’m writing about? How does this serve the overall mission?

Once you have figured that out, you’ll find the details much less intimidating and easier to work with.

Tip 3: It’s all about connections

Understanding something is all about seeing the connections between ideas. So when you’re writing about something that’s hard for your reader to understand, it’s really important to pay a lot of attention to how your paragraphs, sentences, and sections interact with other. That means using lots of connective words and phrases like because, so, and, but, for example, and nevertheless that pinpoint the relationships between the various things you are saying.

Putting a clear, intuitive structure in place, where the logical connections are clearly identified, does for a technical blog or report what excellent acting does for Shakespearean prose. It makes it easy to follow, even for audiences who don’t fully understand all the words you’re using.

Good luck!”

 

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