Explainers

What an explainer is

An explainer is an article that makes one confusing thing clear. A term, a rule, a fee, a process, a document. It answers what the thing is, why it exists, why people find it confusing, and what a reader should now do differently. One thing per piece. An article that explains four things explains none of them.

It is not a how-to guide. A how-to guide ends with the reader having done something; an explainer ends with the reader understanding something, which is often the step that has to come first. It is not a glossary entry either: a glossary gives a definition, and an explainer gives a definition plus the reason the definition never quite lands on its own.

The reader matters more than the format. The person reading an explainer has heard the term several times, has nodded along, and is now too embarrassed to ask. They will not phone you to find out. They will quietly look it up, and whoever explained it properly is the firm they associate with knowing the subject.

When you need one

You need one when a word is standing between a buyer and a purchase. Every trade has two or three: a fee people assume is a trick, a stage nobody understands the purpose of, a legal requirement that sounds worse than it is, a piece of jargon your own staff use without noticing. If your team explains the same term aloud twice a week, that term is costing you sales and it should be a page.

It is also the right piece when a competitor's marketing has muddied a term, or when the honest explanation is unflattering. Being the firm that says plainly what something is, including the awkward part, buys a trust that no amount of adjectives does.

You do not need an explainer if the confusion is spread across twenty small questions rather than concentrated in one. That is an FAQ page, and it is cheaper. And if the term is only confusing because the page describing it is written badly, the fix is a plain-language rewrite of the page you already have, not a new article beside it.

What goes in it

The definition, in the first two sentences. Plain, short, no clauses. The reader arrived embarrassed and needs to stop feeling that way immediately, before they will read anything else.

Why it is confusing. Named openly. The word means two different things in two trades, or it sounds like a charge and is actually a deposit, or it was renamed six years ago. Saying why the confusion exists tells the reader they are not slow, and that is the sentence that keeps them reading.

One analogy, and only one. The comparison that genuinely holds, chosen from several and tested against the edges. Two analogies in one piece cancel each other out. Where the analogy stops working, the piece says so rather than letting the reader overextend it.

What it is not. The two or three things people commonly mistake it for, each distinguished in a sentence. Most confusion is not an absence of knowledge but a collision with a neighbouring idea.

What this means for the reader. Three or four lines saying what to check, ask or expect now that they understand it. An explainer that ends at understanding stops one step short.

What you get

The explainer. Usually 700 to 1,400 words in a shared document you own, with the definition in the opening lines, the headline written as the question people actually ask, and the title tag and meta description in a box at the top.

A one-paragraph version. The same explanation in about sixty words, for staff to paste into an email or read down the phone. In practice this gets more use than the article.

The rejected analogies. A short note listing the comparisons that were tried and where each one broke, so the same wrong analogy is not reintroduced later by somebody with good intentions.

One round of revision is included, usually spent with the person who knows the subject best confirming that the simplification did not become inaccurate.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A small Ontario insurance brokerage finds that a steady number of quotes stall at the same point, when the client sees the word "deductible" beside a figure larger than they expected. The brokers explain it every day. Nobody has ever written it down, and the carrier's own page is four hundred words of policy language.

The explainer is "What a deductible actually is, and how to choose yours," about 1,100 words. It opens with a two-sentence definition and the flat statement that a higher deductible lowers the monthly figure and raises what you pay on a bad day. It then says why the word confuses people: it sounds like a fee you hand over and is in fact a share you agree to carry. The analogy is the excess on a rented tool, and the piece marks where that comparison stops working. A short section separates a deductible from a premium and from a policy limit, the neighbouring ideas it collides with. It closes with three questions to ask before choosing a figure. The one-paragraph version goes into the brokers' email templates, and the stalled-quote conversation now starts from understanding rather than surprise.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which term, who gets stuck on it, and how your people explain it out loud today. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Length, one revision round and the delivery date, agreed before anything starts.
3. The explanation, recorded. Twenty to thirty minutes in which your best explainer talks me through it as if I were a customer. The good analogy is almost always already in their head.
4. The draft. Five to seven working days later, with the one-paragraph version and the note on rejected analogies.
5. The accuracy read. Your specialist checks that nothing was simplified into being wrong. I revise once.
6. Handover. Final explainer, short version and metadata, ready to publish or published for you.

What it costs

Explainers are quoted as a fixed price after the half-hour call. They are among the smaller pieces of writing on this site, and the price turns on how technical the subject is, whether a regulated claim has to be checked, and how many are commissioned together, since a set of five for one trade shares one recorded session. All figures are in CAD and fixed in writing before the recording. The pricing page shows the four ways of working here.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The explanation gets filmed as ninety seconds of script, because some readers would rather be told than read. The neighbouring terms the piece had to distinguish turn out to need explainers of their own, and the set becomes a small vocabulary section your staff link to daily. And once the term is clear, the reader usually wants to act on it, which is where a guide to choosing takes over. None of that is required. One explainer is a complete job, and nothing further is assumed.