How to explain unfamiliar words

How do you explain words to people who aren’t familiar with them?

Start with an everyday description, and then introduce the new term. Use punctuation to mark the new term.

Two examples:

Action words, or verbs, make your writing interesting.
Action words (verbs) make your writing interesting.

Why does this work?

People are more likely to feel like you’re treating them as an equal when you use this order. 

If you reverse the order (Verbs, action words, make…) people can feel like you’re talking down to them. It subtly suggests that ‘you should know what a verb is and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you’.

What about for more complex ideas?

Can’t fit an everyday description into a word or two? Try this.

Imagine you’re explaining the term to someone who doesn’t have any background knowledge. 
1.    State the basics. 
2.    Build up your reader’s knowledge until they’re ready for the new term.
3.    Add a description or example to help them relate the idea to things that are already familiar.

Don't try to smash it all together. Build ideas. You don’t have to squeeze a definition into a single sentence! 

Instead of this:
‘Resilience’ is our ability as a community to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from the impacts of climate change.

Try this:
As a community, we’ll be dealing with climate change. [State the basics] How well we do this is called our ‘resilience’. [Introduce the term] A resilient community: 
•    anticipates changes 
•    prepares for them 
•    responds to them when they happen
•    recovers from them effectively. [relatable, unhurried description]

Where does this explanation go?

That depends on how many of your readers need it.

Will most of your readers be new to the term?
Put the explanation in the text.

Will only a few of your readers need that level of explanation?
Try footnotes or a glossary. You can also use boxes to the right of the page to add your explanation at the spot where it’s needed, called call-out boxes (see what I did there?!)