The curse of authorship is that the information conveyed is not necessarily what the writer intended, but rather what the reader chooses to infer.As someone who attempts to write, both for fun on this blog and the technical, management, and business documents as part of my work, I'm often flummoxed and bemused by the apparent lack of clarity in my writing when a reader ends up inferring meaning that not only didn't I intend, but would've never guessed in a million years that's how they would interpret what I had written.
The only thing that keeps me from feeling totally humiliated by my inability to write clearly is that it happens to real authors as well. I recommended Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" to a friend and when he wrote a summary/critique of what he had read, I was wondering if he had read a different "A Conflict of Visions" than I did. It turns out it was the same book, but we had just interpreted it completely differently.
Poor Sowell, either my friend or I or both have completely misinterpreted his work. But that's the curse of authorship.