A link can make perfect sense in one person’s mind and fail when presented to somebody else.
Explaining links is therefore a separate discipline. The person explaining knows where they started, which intermediate steps they followed and why the destination makes sense. The audience does not. The route must be reconstructed for them.
Explaining with COGS
COGS gives explanations concrete anchors. Instead of presenting a cloud of associations, we can establish:
Who are we talking about?
What are the important things?
Where are we?
When are we?
These coordinates orient the reader. Only then do the more interpretative questions — particularly why and how — become useful.
Who, what, where and when usually describe points.
Why and how usually describe relationships between the points.
That is why COGS concentrates on four dimensions rather than attempting to contain all six traditional journalistic questions.
COGS establishes the pieces on the board.
Explanation tells us why they belong together.
The shortest route is not always the clearest route
Explaining a link requires judgement about how much of the chain to show.
Imagine a connection involving five steps:
A → B → C → D → E
If the audience already knows B, C and D, the connection between A and E may seem obvious. To somebody encountering the idea for the first time, jumping directly from A to E may look arbitrary.
Good explanation involves choosing the correct resolution.
Sometimes a Link Salad needs every step; sometimes one intermediate link is enough. A picture may explain the connection faster than a paragraph, while an unexpected jump may be the entire point.
This is where explaining links overlaps with Zoom. We can zoom out to show the whole network or zoom in to explain one connection in detail.