The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins: An expert guide to compelling communication

Any good recipe needs an ingredient list, a cooking method, and if it’s particularly brilliant there will be a personal touch describing how the recipe was developed through repeated tried and tested experiments until it was just right. There is a melding of the emotional, the personal, and the practical in these instructions, holding the hand of the reader just enough while encouraging creativity. It is this balance which ensures that cookbooks are mainstays of any kitchen. The necessity for good communication is as important as good food. Which is where veteran BBC journalist Ros Atkins’s The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence steps in: it is a recipe book for storytelling, made to be dipped into. The “ingredients list” is information required to communicate effectively. The methodology – from written to spoken explanations – begs to be altered to suit the setting.

Atkins presents a seven-step formula for giving a great explanation, from distilling information to delivering in an easy-to-digest manner. Reviewing a book of this nature is a test as to how well I have absorbed the information in this guide. The crux of it is this: gather information effectively; communicate it clearly; nail the delivery. But, for me, it is not this formula – impressive as it may be – that makes this book interesting. It is in the “personal touch” anecdotes, which draw on Atkins’s life, that give this book its edge.

I was most drawn to the experiential examples in The Art of Explanation, as it offered a rare insight into his career, from starting out as a graduate picking up shifts in a bar while DJing at night to taking a new approach to explanation on the BBC’s Outside Source. As Atkins puts it himself: “Tell a good [story] and people will hang on your every word.” Stories, and how they are told, are at the core of journalism, so it is no surprise that there is a particular brilliance in the anecdotes told here, such as how Atkins began his journalism career as a junior reporter in South Africa. These stories buoy The Art of Explanation, moving it from textbook to something that operates like a well-thumbed cookbook, asserting its value with heart.