Explainers

An explainer assumes the reader is capable and unfamiliar. It takes one thing — a dataset, a chart convention, a document type — and shows how to read it, including the parts that are easy to misread.

What is here now

What a good statistical brief does in four pages reads a National Center for Health Statistics mortality brief closely and treats it as a format worth copying: each finding stated as a sentence with its number before any chart appears. It is the model for this kind of piece, a real document embedded in full rather than described.

Charts that survive without color is adjacent. It demonstrates chart encodings that do not depend on hue, and explains why a chart that works only in color is an exclusion rather than a style choice.

What makes an explainer work

Naming the specific thing to look for. “Read carefully” is not an explainer. “An age-adjusted death rate and a crude rate answer different questions, so check which one a comparison uses” is, because a reader can carry it to the next document they meet.

What is not an explainer

An argument for a position, which belongs in Articles. A description of how this practice works, which belongs under methods. The test is whether the piece leaves the reader able to read something else.