How to explain stuff
Ever had a teacher who explained something in such a knotted way that you felt like you needed to un-learn it afterwards?
When you're explaining a concept to someone, it's vital to build a clean neural pathway in the other person's mind.
Here's how:
Try to find a 'minimum viable story' that latches onto stuff the audience can already relate to, and connect that firmly to the concept. Try to avoid diving into precise technicalities until the audience has a firmer view of the big picture.
In computer science (especially academia), a lot of people don't do this very well. They insist on being rigorously correct--early on--on the more blurry details, and students end up with weak and tangled neural pathways that need to be broken down and re-learned before they can be applied in a useful way.
Example:
If you're trying to explain why software installation in Linux is a hard problem to solve, and you relate it back to broad computing history and the origins of UNIX systems ~50 years ago, it probably isn't worth getting too hung up on whether those early pioneers were using a PDP-10 computer or a PDP-11. Countless lecturers have lost their students' attention at that exact point.
Yeah... It might be a fun detail in its own right, but if you go down that tangent in front of an audience who has no way to relate to what those computers even were or why they were cool 50 years ago, then they end up building a broad and general concept through a narrow, indirect and highly specific neural branch.
But if they grok the big broad concept early, then they gain a wide and firm neural pathway to which they can later add the fun and minute details as sub-branches of knowledge as they explore deeper. That's a far more more useful neural structure to build in your student's (or audience's) mind.