let’s unpack that

How to spot it

Read the sentence that comes next. Everything turns on that one, and reading it costs you about a second, which is less than the announcement costs you. “Let’s unpack that” is a promise of an explanation. The writer is telling you that analysis is on its way, and the news that analysis is coming is not itself analysis. So judge the sentence by what lands immediately after it, and ask whether that sentence could have opened the paragraph on its own.

You are hoping to find new material, something the announcement did not already contain: a distinction you lacked a moment ago, or a cause with a name attached to it. When the next sentence supplies it, the announcement did its job, because it told you the shape of what was coming and then the thing came. When it restates the subject in slightly different clothes, and the sentence after that does the same, the promise was doing all the work and nothing got taken apart.

The wording changes from writer to writer. Let's dive into, let me walk through, let's break this down, let me dig into, let's take a closer look at: most of them borrow a physical action, and every one of them buys the writer a sentence before any real handling has to happen. Knowing the whole family matters, because a writer who has trained themselves off one of these phrases usually reaches for the next one without noticing. Delete the opening clause and read the paragraph without it. When the paragraph loses nothing, the clause can go.

Why models overdo it

Among the likeliest openings for an English paragraph about something complicated is an announcement, and a model chooses its next words by likelihood. It fits in front of any subject, and it commits to nothing that could later turn out to be wrong. That makes it the safest opening on offer, and choosing by likelihood rewards safety, so the announcement gets made, and then made again two paragraphs later.

An announcement also takes on a debt. A writer who promises an explanation has an obligation, and a decent writer feels it: the next sentences are owed, and somebody is waiting to be paid. The model does see the promise, because every word it writes is chosen with all of the earlier text in view. It has no reason to keep it. Nothing in how the next words are chosen rewards paying off a promise the earlier text made, and a sentence that restates the subject in fresh wording can be just as likely as one that delivers the analysis. That is why the failure reads as lateness: every sentence prepares for the next one, and none of them arrives.

When it's fine

Announcing an explanation is harmless when the writer is about to give it. Steven Rattner, writing about trade in The New York Times in 2019, said that few Americans understood how global trade works, both how it can help the economy and how some people get left behind. Then he offered to try to unpack a few of the complexities, and the column took them one at a time, starting with what the trade deficit actually counts. The announcement earned its keep because the complexities were genuinely several, and a reader needed telling that they were about to be taken in order.

Anne Enright used the word to decline the work. She raised an argument about modernism and the middle classes, said there was no time to unpack it, and moved on. That is the rarer and more useful version of the move: naming the thing you are not going to explain, so that a reader knows it was seen and set down on purpose.

Robert Gibbs, taking questions at a White House podium in 2009, said he would walk through a broader answer on the plan, and then gave one, starting with how long the problem had been going and what had already failed at it. Speech needs signposts more than prose does, because a listener cannot look ahead to see how long an answer runs or where it turns. Keep yours when the sentences after it pay the debt.

Where it comes from

“Let’s” is a worn-down “let us,” and “let us” in front of a bare verb is the cohortative mood, a form built for proposing an action the speaker and the listener will take together. It is the same construction as “let’s go” and “let’s eat,” which is why the sentence lands as an invitation. Grammatically, the reader has just been drafted into work that has not started yet.

“Unpack” arrived at its useful sense a great deal later. For most of the verb's life it meant what it means at a suitcase, taking the contents out and setting them where they can be seen. The figurative sense, taking an idea apart and laying its pieces out in order, had settled into ordinary newspaper English well before any model was trained on it, which is why the two writers quoted on this page reach for it with no self-consciousness at all. The sibling verbs came from other rooms of the language and ended up at the same job. Diving belongs to water and digging belongs to ground, and both were pressed into service for work that involves neither.

Scholars of academic writing have a name for a sentence that describes the shape of a piece instead of its subject. Ken Hyland gathered them under metadiscourse and called this particular kind a frame marker, which is the written equivalent of a stage direction. Joseph Williams made the case against the excess in his book Style: a little of it helps a reader find the joints of an argument, and too much of it buries the argument it was meant to introduce.