Communication Stations: Explaining Something Complex Simply

Some communication stations ask you to explain something medical. Plenty do not. Candidates get asked to teach a card game, describe how to get from the train station to the campus, or explain something from a hobby to someone who has never encountered it. The topic is often deliberately ordinary, and that confuses people who arrived expecting to be tested on knowledge.

The trivial topic is the point. Strip out subject expertise and what remains is the actual skill: can you take something that lives in your head and move it into someone else's, at their pace, and check that it arrived.

What is being marked

Exact criteria vary and are not usually published, so check the current admissions page for the course you have applied to rather than relying on any generic list, including this one. That said, the way MMI stations are scored means a communication station is nearly always assessed on observable behaviours rather than the accuracy of your content: whether you avoided jargon, whether you paused, whether you checked, whether the listener could plausibly repeat it back.

This is good news. Every one of those is a habit you can build in a fortnight, unlike a personality.

Open with why it matters to them, not with a definition

The default opening is a definition, because that is how textbooks start. It is the worst possible first sentence for a listener with no scaffolding to hang it on. Start instead with the purpose or the outcome. Not this is a game where you collect sets of three cards, but the aim is to be the first person with no cards left, and everything else is about how you get rid of them.

One more thing before the content: find out what they already know. Have you played anything like this before, or how much have you been told about this already. Ten seconds spent there saves you from explaining what they know or assuming what they do not, and it is frequently a rubric line in its own right.

Plain language, concretely

Plain language is advice everyone agrees with and few people execute under pressure. These are the specific moves.

• One idea per sentence. Nerves produce long sentences with three clauses, and the listener loses the thread at the second one.
• Swap the technical word for the everyday one, and if you must use the technical word, define it once in five words and then keep using it consistently.
• Anchor to something from their world, not yours. An analogy drawn from a subject they have not studied is just a second thing to explain.
• Make numbers concrete. About one in twenty lands better than five per cent, and one person in a full bus lands better again.
• Delete obviously, simply and just. Every one of them tells a confused listener that their confusion is unreasonable, and they will stop asking.
• Signal the sequence out loud. There are three steps, and we are on the second, keeps someone oriented for free.

Chunk it, then check it

The most common failure in these stations is delivering the whole explanation in one uninterrupted block and then asking if it made sense at the end. By then the listener has lost the thread somewhere in the middle and cannot tell you where.

Break the explanation into two or three chunks, and stop between them. Not a rhetorical stop, an actual one, where you look at the person and wait. That pause is where the questions arrive, and a question is the single most useful thing that can happen to you in this station, because it tells you exactly what to fix.

How to check without sounding condescending

Does that make sense is nearly useless, because almost everyone says yes. Do you understand is worse, since it puts the burden of failure on them.

The version that works puts the burden on you and asks for something specific. I want to make sure I have explained that clearly, so could you tell me how you would describe it to your flatmate. Or, simply, which part would you like me to go over again. Both invite a real answer, and both read as respect rather than testing.

Pacing: the silence is doing work

Under pressure people speed up, and in a teaching station speed is a direct cost to comprehension. Two things help. Slow deliberately at the sentence carrying the key idea, because a change in pace marks importance more clearly than volume does. And leave a real gap after each chunk. Three seconds feels endless to you and normal to everyone else.

Watch the face too. Confusion is visible before it is spoken, and a candidate who says I can see that landed oddly, let me try it a different way is demonstrating exactly the awareness these stations exist to find.

When it is not landing

Do not repeat the same explanation louder and slower. That is the reflex and it never works, because the problem was the route, not the volume. Change the approach: try a different analogy, go more concrete, or narrate an example instead of describing a rule. Saying that explanation was not very good, let me try again is not a confession of failure. It is self monitoring in public, and it usually reads well.

Some versions of this station use an actor who has been briefed to be distracted, sceptical, or worried, at which point it becomes a hybrid with a roleplay station. If the person is anxious, information alone will not get through. Acknowledge the feeling first, briefly and genuinely, then continue. Explaining harder at someone who is upset is a common and expensive mistake.

The instruction variant

A well known format has you describing a shape or diagram that the other person must reproduce without seeing it. The trap is starting with detail. Give the overview first: it is a shape that fills most of the page, and there are four parts. Then build. Establish shared reference points, use plain directions rather than clever ones, and check after each element. Candidates who launch straight into draw a line two centimetres from the top left almost always end up with a drawing that is wrong in a way neither of them can locate.

Practising it properly

Explain something you know well to someone who genuinely does not know it, and ask them to repeat it back afterwards. Their version is your score. Do it with a subject from your own study, a hobby, a job, and then work through practice station prompts under time, because two minutes is much shorter than it sounds and most first attempts do not reach the end.

Jargon is the hardest habit to catch on your own, because the words that need swapping are invisible to the person using them. Running a timed station marked against a rubric will name the specific behaviours you skipped, which is more useful than a friend saying it sounded fine. The first speaking station is free on the trial, no card, and the trial never converts on its own.

The candidates who do well here are not the ones who know the most. They are the ones who noticed the other person had stopped following, and did something about it.