Explaining How

Explaining how something should be done or how something happens is usually called process analysis. One kind of process analysis is the "how-to" explanation: how to cook a turkey, how to tune an engine, or how to get a job. These recipes or directions are prescriptive: You typically explain how something should be done. In a second kind of process analysis, you explain how something happens or typically is done — without being directive or prescriptive. In a descriptive process analysis, you explain how some natural or social process typically happens: how cells split during mitosis, how hailstones form in a cloud, how students react to the pressure of examinations, or how political candidates create their public images. In both prescriptive and descriptive explanations, however, you are analyzing a process — dividing the sequence into its parts or steps — and then showing how the parts contribute to the whole process.

Cookbooks, automobile repair manuals, instructions for assembling a toy or appliance, and self-improvement books are all examples of prescriptive process analysis. Writers of recipes, for example, begin with an analysis of the ingredients and the steps in preparing the food. Then they carefully explain how the steps are related, how to avoid problems, and how to serve their mouth-watering concoction. Farley Mowat, naturalist and author of Never Cry Wolf, gives his readers the following detailed — and humorous  — recipe for creamed mouse. Mowat became interested in this recipe when he decided to test the nutritional content of the wolf's diet. "In the event that any of my readers may be interested in personally exploiting this hitherto overlooked source of excellent animal protein," Mowat writes, "I give the recipe in full."

Souris a la Creme

Ingredients:

• One dozen fat mice - Salt and pepper
• One cup white flour - Cloves Ethyl
• One piece sowbelly - alcohol

Skin and gut the mice, but do not remove the heads; wash, then place in a pot with enough alcohol to cover the carcasses. Allow to marinate for about two hours. Cut sowbelly into small cubes and fry slowly until most of the fat has been rendered. Now remove the carcasses from the alcohol and roll them in a mixture of salt, pepper and flour; then place in frying pan and saute for about five minutes (being careful not to allow the pan to get too hot, or the delicate meat will dry out and become tough and stringy). Now add a cup of alcohol and six or eight cloves. Cover the pan and allow to simmer slowly for fifteen minutes. i The cream sauce can be made according to any standard recipe. When the sauce is ready, drench the carcasses with it, cover and allow to rest in a warm place for ten minutes before serving.

Explaining "how" something happens or is typically done uses a descriptive process analysis. It requires showing the chronological relationship between one idea, event, or phenomenon and the next — and it depends on close observation. In Lives of the Cell, biologist and physician Lewis Thomas explains that ants are like humans: they are individuals, but they can also act together to create a social organism. Although exactly how ants communicate remains a mystery, Thomas explains how they combine to form a thinking, working organism.

[Ants] seem to live two kinds of lives: they are individuals, going about the day's business without much evidence of thought for tomorrow, and they are at the same time component parts, cellular elements, in the huge, writhing, ruminating organism of the Hill, the nest, the hive...

A Solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can't be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, plan¬ning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

At a stage in the construction, twigs of a certain size are needed, and all the members forage obsessively for twigs of just this size. Later, when outer walls are to be finished, thatched, the size must change, and as though given new orders by telephone, all the workers shift the search to the new twigs. If you disturb the arrangement of a part of the Hill, hundreds of ants will set it vibrating, shifting, until it is put right again, Distant sources of food are somehow sensed, and long lines, like tentacles, reach out over the ground, up over walls, behind boulders, to fetch it in.