content creation

Lee LeFever underscores his excellent new book, The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand, by suggesting it’s, “Your guide to becoming an explanation specialist.” As you might expect from a book about becoming “an explanation specialist,” it’s also a perfect explanation of what you can expect.

Let’s be real. For a world so heavily dependent on communication, it’s amazing how frequently we fail to get our message across. Content marketing depends on clear communication, yet we often struggle to deliver our meaning and intent to our audience, right?

Happily, LeFever offers a wonderful guide to closing the communication gap all too common in business and in life. The book walks you through the steps necessary to improve your explanations, regardless of the form those explanations take (though, obviously, the material is particularly well-suited to presentations, video, email, and similar forms). LeFever’s day job at Common Craft revolves around taking complicated material and translating it for audiences of all kinds (their YouTube videos are legendary). The experience LeFever has gained over the years shows clearly throughout the book, which is filled with many examples from Common Craft’s library.

While the book covers some of the same ground as other excellent titles like Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology, or Dan Roam’s amazing The Back of the Napkin and Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work (and in fact, LeFever highlights and recaps Roam’s “6×6 Rule” in chapter 16), The Art of Explanation earns its own place on your business bookshelf by focusing first on communication and only then on your selected medium. It complements these other titles; it neither replaces them, nor vice versa.

If your business success depends on the skill with which you communicate (here’s a hint: it does), you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of The Art of Explanation: Making your Ideas, Products, and Services Easier to Understand, today.

Interested in more? Sign up for our free newsletter and get more information on how to build your social, local, mobile marketing strategy. And, if you’ve got a minute, you might enjoy some past reviews from our Book Review of the Week-ish series:

• The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• Being Strategic by Erick Andersen (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• The New Relationship Marketing by Mari Smith (Book Review of the Week-ish)

Tagged as: book review, book review of the week, books, content, content creation, content curation, content marketing, presentation

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