The Quiet Skill Behind Every Recipe, Manual, and How-To Guide
Most of what you read in a day isn't trying to win an argument or tell a story — it's just trying to make something clear. Here's a breakdown of that kind of writing and a process for doing it well.
You Already Do This More Than You Realize
Think about the last dozen things you read before lunch. A recipe card. The setup instructions for a new router. A coworker's message about how the approval process actually works. A textbook page on photosynthesis. None of those pieces of writing were trying to convince you of anything, and none of them were telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. They were doing one job: taking something you didn't understand and making it understandable.
That job has a name — expository writing — but almost nobody thinks of it that way while they're doing it. You just call it "writing the instructions" or "explaining the thing." Fiction gets workshops. Persuasive essays get whole units in school. This plainer, more common mode mostly gets ignored, even though it's probably the one you use the most.
The rest of this piece breaks down the different shapes that explaining can take, walks through a process for doing it clearly, and points out a few habits that quietly make explanations harder to follow than they need to be.
A Rough Sense of Scale
A Rough Shape, Not a Precise Measurement
Take those numbers as a general shape of the territory rather than a precise measurement — nobody has cleanly audited the internet's writing by genre, and estimates like these tend to vary depending on who's counting and what they consider "mostly explanatory." The point isn't the exact percentage. It's that this kind of writing is doing a lot more of the daily work than its reputation suggests.
Six Common Shapes Explanatory Writing Takes
| Type | What It's Doing | One-Line Example |
|---|---|---|
| Descriptive | Paints a picture of what something is, looks like, or feels like | Describing what a tide pool looks like at low tide, without arguing whether it's beautiful |
| Process | Walks through steps in the order you'd actually perform them | How to fold a fitted sheet without losing your patience |
| Comparison | Sets two or more things side by side on shared criteria | Renting versus buying a car, matched up cost by cost |
| Cause and effect | Connects a trigger to what follows from it | Why a phone battery degrades faster in cold weather |
| Problem and solution | Names a specific snag, then lays out a fix | Why your bread keeps deflating in the oven, and what to change |
| Definition | Pins down what a term means before using it further | What "APR" actually covers before a loan document throws it around |
A Process for Explaining Something So It Actually Lands
- 1Pick one job before you write a sentence
Decide up front whether you're describing, walking through steps, comparing, tracing cause and effect, fixing a problem, or defining a term. Mixing two of these in one paragraph is usually what makes writing feel muddled — the reader can't tell if you're still explaining or now arguing.
- 2Picture the one thing your reader is missing
Not the reader in general — one specific person who knows almost everything except the piece you're about to hand them. Write toward that gap instead of toward everyone who might ever read it.
- 3Order information the way a mind actually receives it
Steps go in the order they happen. Comparisons go point by point, not one whole thing and then the other. Definitions come before the term gets used again. Readers rarely notice good ordering, but they always notice bad ordering.
- 4Remove anything that isn't doing explaining work
Opinions, hedges, and asides that don't clarify the thing at hand are just friction. A sentence earns its place by making the next sentence easier to understand, not by sounding thoughtful.
- 5Hand it to someone who wasn't in the room
The person who already understands the topic is the worst judge of whether an explanation works. Give the draft to someone with no context and watch where they get stuck — that's the spot to rewrite.
Watch for sentences that describe the writing instead of doing it — "there are several factors to consider" or "this is a complex issue." They feel like they're building toward an explanation but never actually explain anything. Cut them and go straight to the factor or the complexity itself.
Product FAQs, onboarding emails, internal wikis, assembly instructions, even a group chat message explaining how splitting the bill works — all of it is this same basic move: someone knows something, someone else doesn't yet, and the writing closes that gap.
One More Thing Worth Checking Before You Publish
Explanatory writing carries a particular risk that persuasive or narrative writing mostly avoids: it makes specific, checkable claims. A process explanation states that step three happens before step four. A cause-and-effect piece asserts that one thing actually leads to another. A comparison implies that the numbers on each side are accurate. Readers tend to trust this kind of writing more than they trust an opinion piece, which means the cost of getting a detail wrong is higher, not lower.
If a draft you're finishing up leans on a statistic, a historical date, a technical spec, or a claim about how some process works, it's worth a quick pass to confirm those details actually hold up before they go out into the world. That's the kind of spot-check AI Humanizer Lab's Citation Checker is built for — it flags claims worth a second look and helps you trace them back to something real, so the explanation you worked hard to make clear is also one people can trust.
Make your writing sound human
Humanize AI-generated text in one click with AI Humanizer Lab.
Try for free