Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) thought deeply about why readers so often “don’t get” what writers believe they’ve made perfectly clear. He posited that getting a thought from your head onto the page is easy, but getting that same thought from the page into another person’s head is hard. The writer is coasting downhill, carried by earlier knowledge of the subject; readers are trudging uphill, with nothing but the words to guide them. Clarity, then, is the writer’s moral and intellectual duty—not a test of the reader.
On Schopenhauer’s view, if people don’t understand you, your first assumption should be that your writing has failed, not that your readers are lazy dimwits. Treat every confusion as evidence that you’ve left out steps, hidden your structure, relied on private associations, or settled for vague language. Your task is to load the page so carefully—with explicit transitions, concrete phrasing, and visible reasoning—that the reader can scarcely help thinking what you thought. Anything less is, for Schopenhauer, not only a lapse in craft but a discourtesy to “readers who just don’t get it.”