Get the order right first
Six stages of how a second-hand book reaches a charity-shop shelf. Put them in order.
- The things that will not sell here are boxed and sent to a central warehouse.
- The bags are left at the door, usually overnight and usually in the rain.
- They are shelved by category, and moved to the front table if they have not sold in a month.
- What is left is sorted into fiction, non-fiction and things that will not sell here.
- The rest are priced by whoever is on the till, from a laminated sheet nobody quite follows.
- They are opened in the back room and anything damp is thrown straight out.
Somebody explaining something they know
How a train comes to be late
A train is not late in one place. It is made late somewhere, and then it stays late everywhere afterwards — which is why the delay you experience is almost never caused by anything you can see from the platform.
Each service is given a path: a set of times at a set of points. The paths are laid on top of one another so tightly that a train which loses ninety seconds has already lost its place. It is then held, because the train behind it is on time and cannot be delayed to let a late one through. Being held makes it later.
At the terminus the same physical train is turned round and sent out as a different service. So a delay in the morning is inherited by an afternoon service with a different number, which is where the cause disappears from the record.
The bottleneck is not track. It is crew. Drivers are booked to specific diagrams, and a driver who has been kept beyond their hours cannot simply be asked to continue. A replacement has to be found, and at some hours of the day there is not one.
When it goes wrong badly, services are cancelled on purpose. A train is removed to give the rest of the timetable room — which is why the one that is cancelled is often not the one that was late.
Three questions about how the explanation is built.
1. What is the subject of nearly every sentence?
2. The fourth paragraph does something the others do not. What?
3. Why is there almost no agent anywhere in the text?
Four moves of a good explanation
The text made four moves, in this order: one sentence of overview · the stages, in order, on one subject · the bottleneck, with the wrong guess corrected first · what happens when it goes wrong.
The third move is what separates somebody who knows a process from somebody who has read about it.
Eight phrases. Match each to the move it makes.
Two minutes of assembly
One to four words per gap. Some gaps are passive verbs; some are the sequencing phrases.
Broadly, what is this. The bags overnight and opened the following morning. Once that done, anything damp is thrown out. The rest into three piles. The bottleneck is not the sorting — it the pricing, which is done by one person from a sheet nobody follows. In , though, books that have not sold in a month to the front table and forgotten.
Five sentences of the kind that appear when somebody is explaining and monitoring at the same time.
1. The bags are leave at the door overnight.
2. Once that has done, the damp ones are thrown out.
3. The books will priced from a sheet.
4. They are sorted by a volunteer by category.
5. The rest is moved to the front table. — the rest are several books
Explain it, defend it, then explain somebody else’s
How the twenty-six minutes run. Five minutes alone, twelve in pairs, eight with a new partner, one to move.
Stage 1 · Alone · 5 minutes
Map a process you genuinely understand — from work, from a hobby, from your household, from a place you used to work.
Stages on paper, in order. Not sentences.
- One line of overview: what goes in, what comes out.
- Between four and seven stages, each one a thing that happens to the same object.
- Mark the bottleneck. Then mark what most people wrongly assume the bottleneck is.
- Mark the branch: what happens when something goes wrong at one stage.
Stage 2 · Pairs · 6 minutes each
Explain your process. Your partner is allowed to interrupt, and should.
Six minutes, including the interruptions. Repair on the spot; do not start again.
- Listener may say "stop — who does that?" at any point. You answer, then decide out loud whether the answer belongs in the explanation.
- Listener may say "stop — what are we talking about now?" whenever they lose the subject. That is the important one.
- Listener keeps a count of the second interruption. Report it at the end.
- Speaker: use at least four of the eight sequencing phrases, and name the bottleneck out loud.
Stage 3 · New partner · 8 minutes
Find somebody who did not hear your explanation. Explain the process your first partner told you about.
Four minutes each. You are explaining something you learned twenty minutes ago and do not really know.
- You will not know who does most of the stages. Notice what your grammar does about that.
- Where you genuinely cannot remember a detail, say so. Do not invent an agent to fill a gap.
- Your new partner asks one question at the end: what is the bottleneck?
- If you cannot answer that, the explanation you heard did not include it — which is worth telling the person who gave it to you.
Two counts, one comparison
Two questions.
1. When did your listener say "what are we talking about now?"
2. What happened to your grammar in stage 3, explaining a process you did not know?
One subject, four moves
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What makes an explanation feel like it came from somebody who knows?
2. Why did the passive get easier in stage 3?
Next. Your own passives, from today — the ones that held the description together, and the by-phrases that were doing nothing at all.