Writing an educational script is complicated. How do you balance giving accurate information with delivering it in a way that engages your audience? Good news is they’re kind of the same thing.
To educational audiences, the value that comes from explaining ideas is the reason they engage with the video so writing scripts in this niche is really about making that value accessible to that audience.
But to this end, scripts can often over-explain complex topics that make audiences feel talked down to or worse, insulted.
Avoiding this can be challenging, particularly when dealing with very complex fields, but here are some tips I’ve used to write for educational channels that may help you out.
1. You’re Not Laying a Foundation
It is difficult to know when you are over explaining and when you are under explaining, after all, you need to give the audience enough context to help them understand the video but not so much context that they cannot engage with the video critically.
Try to put yourself in the viewer’s shoes. Some of the best educational videos I’ve seen are ones where I can engage with the analysis or I can try to guess what the conclusion will be, but I can’t do that if I don’t understand the basic principles of the video.
This is why I approach writing educational scripts from an angle of providing a strong foundation before jumping into complex analysis. For example, I recently wrote a script about the way AI “thinks” and I had to learn a lot about how AI stores information.
So when it came to writing the script I realized I knew more than the audience did. I had done my research so well that I actually understood what I was talking about and my first draft of the script was horrible.
It was way too short because I had explained it as if I was talking to myself.
So I took a step back. I took a break from the script for a couple of hours and I came back with fresh eyes. I approached the script from the point of view of the audience, always thinking:
- What question does the audience have?
- What answer is the video going to provide?
- Why should they care?
For one of these sections I was going to dig into the topic of superposition which is essentially the idea that AI can store multiple bits of information in one unit of storage so I naturally went okay well the audience will probably wonder:
- Audience question: If superposition is so clever, what’s the downside?
- Video answer: Packing features into the same space means their representations overlap. Sometimes activating one feature accidentally activates another.
- Why should the audience care: That’s one reason AI can make mistakes, and it’s the trade-off behind the industry’s current scaling strategy. So MIT researchers have taken that idea and asked if superposition is responsible for scale factors.
I did this to every other section and my second draft was immediately way better because my structure wasn’t focused on what I knew, but on how I wanted the audience to understand it.
2. Not Having a Conversation
This back and forth thinking with the audience at an outline level meant that when I got to the script I was having more of a conversation with them.
Even though we are explaining complex topics, don’t be scared to treat them in lighthearted ways and to just have a conversation with your viewers.
One of the best channels that I’ve ever seen do this is Cleo Abram and if you’re in the educational space and have not heard of her I simply cannot recommend her enough.
Something I think she does really really well is that she talks to her audience as if she was your friend. She communicates complex information in understandable terms without being scared of digging into the technicalities.
So if you’re talking about say an eclipse, instead of talking about the rotation of the earth right away somebody like Cleo might tell you about the effects that it has in the world first, like the moon goes in front of the sun and it creates a shadow and then she will dig into why that shadow happens when she already has your attention.
That’s really how you build a concrete conversation with your audience that helps them engage with the content without being lost in the explanation.
3. Not Leaving Space for Audience Analysis.
To that end, a big part of giving the audience the space to have this analysis is to link your sections back to the main concept of the video.
Let’s use the eclipse example. If you’re talking about why lunar eclipses or solar eclipses are so rare and why it’s a once in a lifetime thing that you should absolutely go see, you may be building up to a point that proves they are an extraordinary phenomenon.
But your first section may just be about how an eclipse works, so the audience can then understand why it’s so strange that you get to witness one, particularly if you live somewhere populated like a city.
What you can do at the end of that section is link back to the bigger point you’re making. For example, if you’re talking about the effect of the earth’s rotation, you may link it back to eclipses being so rare and interesting because getting the earth to line up in the right spot is a lot more difficult than it seems.
Educational scripts are really just about that. It’s just communicating complex information to an audience that is already interested in learning about it in a way that is clear and engages them by inviting them to analyze and hypothesize about the idea you are presenting.
You want to give them just enough context so that they can understand what you’re talking about while still presenting it in a conversational way like you’re talking to a friend. All of that together will naturally give the audience enough space to dig into your video and that’s how retention in the educational space tends to work.
Speaking of eclipses, they actually are pretty cool and pretty rare. So if you have one coming nearby absolutely make the time to go watch it just make sure to put some glasses on first .