How to Explain Complex Ideas Simply (ELI5 Method)
Before you fix a single sentence, write down what the whole thing is claiming. One sentence, no clauses. If you can't produce it, you haven't understood the text yet, and every simplification you attempt after that will be a guess dressed up as a summary.
That's most of it. Learning to explain complex ideas simply is mostly cleanup after that — jargon, sentence length, the qualifiers people drop without noticing. I'll run all of it on one text so you can see the moves rather than read about them.
What ELI5 actually asks for
ELI5 stands for "explain like I'm 5." The name has probably done more harm than good. People hear it and produce baby talk, or they refuse on the grounds that their subject is too serious for it.
Neither is the request. ELI5 asks you to remove what sits between the reader and the idea: undefined terms, subjects buried four words deep, sentences carrying three clauses that could have been three sentences. Vocabulary level is a side effect, not the goal.
The test of a good one isn't how short it came out. It's whether the original claim is still intact when you're done. (If you're interested in where shorthand like this comes from, our colloquialisms examples cover the spoken side of the same habit.)
The text I'm using
David Pearce is a British philosopher. In 1995 he self-published an online manifesto called The Hedonistic Imperative, which argues that pharmacology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology could eventually be combined to remove unpleasant experience from human and animal life — a program he named the abolitionist project.
I picked it because the ratio is unusual. The terminology is genuinely forbidding and the argument underneath is not. Most texts that look hard are hard. This one mostly isn't, once the words come off.
Whether Pearce is right is a separate argument, and not one I'm making here.
Write the one-sentence core
Here's the whole manifesto, plainly:
Suffering exists because of how brains were built by evolution. If we can rebuild them, suffering could go — and Pearce argues we're obliged to try.
Twenty-eight words for a book.
Most people reach for an analogy at this stage. Skip it. Analogies are a delivery tool, and if you build one before you have the core sentence, you end up explaining your analogy instead of the text — and the two drift apart quietly, because nobody checks a metaphor against the source. Get the core down first in flat, ugly language. Make it elegant later, if at all.
Define the jargon instead of swapping it
The reflex is to read past unfamiliar words and hope context fills the gap. It usually doesn't, because the specialist terms are typically where the argument lives.
Replace each one with a definition, not a synonym. A synonym trades one unfamiliar word for another. A definition unpacks it.
| Term | Plain English |
|---|---|
| The hedonistic imperative | A moral duty to reduce suffering wherever we can |
| The abolitionist project | The plan to end suffering through biology rather than therapy |
| Paradise engineering | Pearce's own name for the whole program |
| Gradients of bliss | Feeling good at different intensities, so you still respond to what happens to you |
| Wireheading | Stimulating the brain's reward centers directly — which Pearce rejects |
Look at the last row. In the source, wireheading is the position Pearce distinguishes himself from; he's said he doesn't consider it a plausible future and argues for resetting the range instead. Skim past that word and you'd walk away believing the opposite of what he wrote.
One rule does a lot of the work here. When a noun has been built out of a verb — implementation, optimization, modification — turn it back. "The implementation of genetic modification" becomes "editing genes." Half the words, and somebody is finally doing something.
Decide how simple is simple enough
This is the part I rarely see addressed, and it's the part people actually get wrong. "Simplify" is not a destination. You have to pick a stopping point.
Same claim, three ways:
Academic
The abolitionist project holds that the biological substrates of aversive experience are, in principle, amenable to genetic intervention.
Neutral
Pearce argues that suffering has a biological basis, so genetic tools could eventually reduce or remove it.
Casual
His point is that pain comes from biology, and biology can be edited.
The middle one is where almost all professional writing belongs. It reads easily and gives up nothing.
The casual version is where the damage starts. Not because it's wrong — it's fine — but because the mechanism that makes it short is dropping qualifiers, and the qualifiers are frequently the argument. Push one more step toward jokes and asides and you're no longer describing the text, you're performing a reaction to it.
There's a cost on the other side too, and it's worth naming: the neutral version loses "in principle." Pearce is making a claim about what's possible given the right technology, not a forecast about this century. Every simplification spends something. The question is only whether you know what you spent.
If it helps, there's evidence the tradeoff is smaller than people fear. Daniel Oppenheimer ran five experiments on this in 2006 and found that increasing a text's complexity lowered readers' estimates of the author's intelligence — and the effect held regardless of how good the original essay was. Undergraduates in the study reported deliberately using bigger words to seem smarter. It backfired. Translated into working life: the memo you complicated to look competent is doing the reverse, on people who will never tell you.
Our guide to formal vs informal English has the register conversions in more detail if you want a system for choosing.
Break sentences at the joints
Long sentences are usually two or three short ones stacked. Find the connectors — which, although, thereby, in order to, semicolons — and cut there.
A sentence in the style of the original:
Although the technical obstacles remain considerable, the abolitionist project maintains that suffering, which is ultimately a product of specific neurochemical states, is amenable to intervention in a way that psychological approaches are not.
Rebuilt:
Suffering comes from specific brain chemistry. Pearce argues that this makes it a target for biological intervention, in a way that talk therapy isn't. The technical obstacles are still substantial.
Three sentences, and the concession moved to the end, where concessions do their job instead of blocking the door.
Keep the hedges
Could. In principle. May eventually. These look like padding and they aren't — they're the difference between a proposal and a prediction. Pearce writes that suffering could eventually be eliminated. Write "will be eliminated" and you've reported a stronger claim than the one on the page. Cut the decoration, keep the qualifiers.
Read it out loud
Run out of breath and the sentence is too long. Stumble and your reader will too. Hit a word you'd never say to a person — utilize, facilitate, aforementioned — and take it out.
Where this goes wrong
Simplifying into inaccuracy. Shorter is only better if it's still true. Check your version against the original, not against your memory of reading the original.
Keeping the shape. Swapping individual words inside a 45-word structure produces something that reads like a bad translation. Rebuild from the idea.
Mistaking informal for clear. Slang and jokes feel welcoming, but they add a layer the reader has to decode. Neutral and direct wins nearly every time.
The one I see most often is the hedge problem, and it's invisible from the inside — you drop a "could," the sentence gets punchier, and you've quietly reported something the author never claimed. Nobody catches it because the new sentence reads better than the old one.
The 60-second checklist
- One-sentence core, written down
- Every specialist term defined, not swapped
- Register chosen on purpose
- Nothing over about 25 words
- Hedges intact
- Read aloud without stumbling
Questions people ask
What does ELI5 mean?
"Explain like I'm 5" — a request for an explanation that assumes no prior knowledge. It's usually credited to Reddit, and I couldn't pin down the first use, so I'll leave that where it is.
What is David Pearce's hedonistic imperative?
The argument in his 1995 manifesto that suffering has a biological basis, that biotechnology could eventually remove it, and that we're therefore obliged to pursue that. He calls the practical program the abolitionist project. The full manifesto is at hedweb.com.
Does writing simply make you sound less professional?
The evidence points the other way — see the Oppenheimer study above. What reads as unprofessional is usually vagueness, and jargon is very good at hiding vagueness.
How short should the simplified version be?
Cut until removing anything else would change the meaning, then stop. Four hundred words becoming ninety accurate ones is a win. Becoming twenty inaccurate ones is not.
Take the last paragraph that made you re-read it — a lease clause, an abstract, an email from HR — and write its one-sentence core. Just that one step. You'll know within a minute whether you understood the thing or were nodding along.
