You have probably read something written by a brilliant person that made no sense.
Not because they did not understand the subject. Because they understood it too well.
This sounds backwards. Expertise should make communication easier. You know more, so you can explain more clearly.
But that is not what happens. Knowledge does not automatically improve explanation. In many cases, it makes explanation harder—because the more you know, the more you forget what it was like not to know.
The curse of knowing too much
There is a well-documented phenomenon in psychology sometimes called the curse of knowledge: once you have learned something, you cannot fully reconstruct the mental state of not knowing it.
The knowledge becomes invisible to you. It feels like common sense. It feels like the obvious starting point. And so you build on it without explaining it—because why would you explain something obvious?
The reader, who does not have that knowledge, arrives at your explanation and finds it suspended in midair. The foundation you are standing on is invisible to them.
This is not arrogance. It is a perceptual problem. You genuinely cannot see what you are skipping.
How expertise degrades writing
It makes jargon invisible
Every field develops shorthand. The shorthand starts as compression—a way to refer to complex concepts quickly among people who share the background.
Over time, the shorthand becomes automatic. You stop hearing it as specialist language. It starts to feel like plain English.
The words that signal "I know this field" to colleagues are the same words that signal "I don't know if you know this field" to everyone else. And because you have stopped hearing them as technical, you stop noticing when you use them.
It collapses the steps
When you first learn something, you experience each step. You struggle with step one before you reach step two. The path is memorable because it was effortful.
When you have known something for years, the steps compress. The whole sequence fires at once. What took you weeks to learn now takes seconds to recall.
When you explain it, you explain the compressed version—not the sequential one. You describe where you end up, not how you get there.
It shifts your reference point
The longer you know something, the more your mental model is built around the expert version of it. You think in terms of the nuances, the exceptions, the advanced applications.
The reader is thinking about the basics.
You are explaining a building by discussing the load-bearing structure. They are still trying to understand what a wall is.
It changes what seems important
Experts and beginners do not agree on what information matters most.
A beginner needs the high-level framework first. The categories. The basic vocabulary. The core logic.
An expert wants to talk about what is interesting, which is usually the hard parts—the edge cases, the counterintuitive findings, the places where the simple model breaks down.
Expert writing often leads with what is interesting to the expert, which means leading with what is hardest for the reader.
What this looks like in practice
The compressed explanation:
The system uses event-driven architecture with pub-sub messaging to decouple services and improve fault tolerance.
To the writer, that sentence is clear. To someone without the background, it contains five concepts that each require explanation before the sentence makes sense.
The reference-shifted explanation:
As you probably know, the key tension here is between normative and descriptive approaches, which shapes the entire analytical framework.
"As you probably know" is a tell. The writer is unsure whether the reader knows this, so they flag it—but they do not explain it, because explaining it would slow down the argument they want to make.
The jargon-dense explanation:
We need to optimize the onboarding funnel to reduce drop-off at the activation step.
Every word in that sentence is recognizable English. Put together, they form a sentence that many people outside of product or growth roles would not be able to act on.
The problem with simplifying after the fact
The instinct when someone says "this is confusing" is to simplify. Cut the jargon. Add more explanation.
But simplification done after the fact is harder than it looks, because the writer is still inside their own knowledge. They add explanations for the parts that feel obscure to them—but those are rarely the parts that are obscure to the reader.
The reader is confused by the foundation. The writer explains the roof.
How to write past the curse
Write for someone specific, not someone general
"A general audience" is not a person. It is an abstraction, and abstractions are easy to write past.
A specific person is harder to ignore. If you write imagining a specific colleague who knows the adjacent field but not yours, you will naturally include more of the foundation. You will notice the jargon because you can picture them stumbling on it.
Explain the concept before the term
Name the idea before you name the name.
Not: "We use idempotency to handle retries."
But: "If a request gets sent twice by mistake—which happens—we need the system to handle it safely. The technical term for that property is idempotency."
Now the term is anchored to something the reader can understand.
Ask yourself what question the reader has not asked yet
The information you are tempted to skip is often the information the reader most needs.
Before you write a section, ask: what does the reader need to believe or understand before this will make sense?
If the answer is something you have not said yet, say it first.
Read it back after sleeping on it
When you write something and read it immediately, your brain fills in the gaps the same way it filled them when you wrote. You see what you meant, not what you wrote.
After a night's sleep, some of those automatic fills fade. You are slightly more likely to notice the leap you made, the term you did not explain, the step you assumed.
It is not a perfect fix—you are still the expert—but it helps.
Have someone else read it before it matters
This sounds obvious. Most people do not do it.
A reader who is not you will find the confusion in sixty seconds that you have been blind to for hours. You do not need their rewrite. You just need to know where they got lost.
When confusion is not your fault
Not all confusing writing comes from the curse of knowledge.
Sometimes the subject is genuinely complex and cannot be simplified beyond a certain point. Sometimes the reader is the wrong reader for that level of explanation. Sometimes confusion is the honest signal that more thinking is needed before writing is attempted.
But most of the time, when smart people write confusing things, the subject is not the problem.
The problem is the gap between what the writer can no longer see and what the reader has not yet learned.
Closing that gap is not about writing less intelligently. It is about writing with enough memory of what it felt like to not know.
When the tool is useful
If you have written something technical or complex and you are not sure whether it will land for a non-specialist reader, Explain With AI can help you see it from the other side—not to replace your explanation, but to identify where the gaps are.
Expertise is valuable. The ability to explain expertise is a separate skill. Both are worth developing.