It's amazing how terrible words are for imbuing your thoughts into a medium.
Communication is a chain of conversions represented by the following graph
1. Idea
2. mapping of idea to a concept
3. concept to word mapping (C2W)
4. Words spoken -> Transmission of sounds through medium -> words received
5. Word to concept mapping (W2C)
6. mapping of concept to an idea
7. Idea
I use the word concept here to represent an analogy or any sort of visual
or common phenomena that a person might experience themselves.
Any item in this list can go awry during communication. Even if you have
items 1-4 down pat, it is completely in the receiver's end to interpret
and formulate correctly.
To combat miscommunication you need to have a good idea of the mapping
function in step 6. You want to be able to interpolate given their
output at step 4 what happened to them in step 6. It really is a messy
and imprecise process.
There's even a hidden step in here which represents the Brains willingness
to engage or its attention.
You might hear someone say something and the sequence reaches all the way to
step seven, and your brain will just not engage. Like it came down the
conveyor belt and your brain refused to pick it up.
You are trying to stimulate the audience's brain so that in their complex neural
net they have a similar understanding of the idea you are trying to convey.
And this isn't necessarily the same in your brain as it is theirs, as they might
select the wrong reverse map (even if they have the correct mappings in their head)
The mapping of thought over the physical matter will be different.
You want them to be as similar as possible.
