A writer submits a manuscript, convinced it says exactly what they intended. Their editor returns it with a single comment: “I’m not sure what you’re arguing here.” The writer reads it back and sees, for the first time, that the argument was never actually on the page. It existed, complete and coherent, in their head — but between intention and execution, something failed to cross over. This is not a rare failure. It may be the most common failure in writing.
The gap between what someone means and what they actually say is not merely an inconvenience. It sits at the centre of what makes communication difficult — not just in writing, but in speech, in professional relationships, and in any situation where one person needs another to understand them accurately.
What we say versus what we mean: the pragmatics problem
Linguists have been mapping this gap for decades. H. P. Grice, in his 1967 William James Lectures at Harvard (published in 1975 as ‘Logic and Conversation,’ in Syntax and Semantics, and later collected in Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, 1989), argued that speakers routinely convey more than the literal content of their words. His framework — the Cooperative Principle — proposed that listeners don’t just parse sentences; they make inferences about what the speaker intends based on shared assumptions about how communication works. When someone says “I’m tired,” the sentence is factually simple. In context, it may be a request to leave, a bid for sympathy, or a deflection from a difficult conversation. The literal content and the communicative intent are different things.
Grice identified four maxims guiding cooperative exchange — be sufficiently informative, be truthful, be relevant, be clear — and observed that speakers often appear to violate these maxims deliberately. That deliberate “flouting,” as he called it, is how irony, implicature, and indirection work. The speaker says less than they mean; the listener infers the rest. This works smoothly when both parties share enough context. It breaks down the moment that context diverges.
The problem for writers is that the context shared in speech — tone, gesture, prior relationship, immediate setting — is stripped away. What remains is only the words. And writers consistently overestimate how much those words carry on their own.
The writer’s curse: knowing too much
In 1979, Linda Flower published “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing” in College English, which identified a structural reason for this overestimation. Flower distinguished between writer-based prose — writing organised around the writer’s own discovery process, following the path through which they came to understand something — and reader-based prose, which is reorganised around what the reader needs to follow that understanding from scratch. Most first drafts, she argued, are writer-based. The writer knows the material and has thought deeply about it, and the prose reflects that journey. The reader, encountering it without the journey, needs the destination — and a clear path leading there.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of perspective-taking, and it’s nearly unavoidable. Writers carry everything they know about their subject into the act of writing; they can’t unfeel the weight of that context. The result is prose that gestures towards ideas the writer can see fully but has not actually written down.
Editors encounter this constantly in manuscripts where the argument is implicit rather than stated — where the writer assumes the connection between two sections is obvious, because for them it is.
The dissonance experienced writers recognise
Nancy Sommers’s influential 1980 study in College Composition & Communication, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” compared how novice and experienced writers approached revision. The distinction she found was not primarily about skill with language. It was about the capacity to recognise a specific kind of failure. Experienced writers — editors, journalists, published authors — described revision as driven by the recognition of “incongruities between intention and execution.” They could sense the distance between what they meant and what the text actually said, and that dissonance sent them back to the page.
Student writers, by contrast, treated revision as a surface operation: changing words, adjusting phrasing, correcting grammar. They couldn’t perceive the gap because they were still reading what they intended to say, not what they had written.
The ability to feel the gap — to read your own work as a reader rather than its author — is a developed skill, not a natural one.
Most communicators, in writing and in speech, are reading their own intentions rather than their actual output. They are fluent in a language their reader does not speak.
Indirection as strategy, not failure
Not all gaps between intent and expression are accidental. Many are deliberate. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s politeness theory, developed through the 1970s and published in 1987, documented the extensive work speakers do to avoid saying things directly when those things carry social risk. They introduced the term “face-threatening acts” — any communication that could damage the listener’s sense of their own standing or autonomy — and described the strategies people use to soften or displace such acts. Among these, indirection is the most significant. Rather than saying “I disagree with your proposal,” a speaker might say “That’s an interesting approach” and leave the rest to inference. The intent is not hidden, exactly — it’s encoded, with the expectation that the listener will decode it.
In professional and institutional writing, this indirection becomes formulaic. Recommendation letters that describe someone as “a reliable presence in the office” — without noting any intellectual contribution — are understood by readers in those fields to be qualified assessments. The writer knows what they’re signalling. Whether the reader catches the signal depends on whether they share the same decoding conventions.
Cross those cultural or professional boundaries, and the indirection fails entirely: the reader takes the praise at face value and misses the withholding.
In this sense, the gap between intent and expression is not always a bug. It is frequently a feature — a tool for navigating social constraint. But it is a tool that depends entirely on a shared interpretive framework between writer and reader. When that framework does not exist, the intent is lost.
What editing reveals
Working on other people’s writing surfaces this gap in a specific, practical way. The editor reads without the author’s context, without the knowledge of what was intended, and often finds themselves at the point where the prose stops making claims and starts assuming them. There is a particular kind of sentence that appears repeatedly in manuscripts: one that is grammatically complete, stylistically polished, and genuinely unclear about what it is saying. The author cannot see the problem because the meaning is already in their head. The editor cannot supply it because the meaning was never encoded in the text.
The question Flower’s framework implies — what does the reader need to follow this from scratch? — is the right diagnostic. It requires writers to imagine a reader who has not had access to their thinking process, who arrives at the text with no accumulated context, and who will only receive what is actually on the page. This is harder than it sounds. It requires a kind of deliberate estrangement from one’s own prose — reading it as a stranger would, rather than as its author.
Experienced writers develop this capacity through iteration. They learn to distrust their own fluency, to treat the first draft as writer-based by default, and to revise with the specific goal of making the connection between their intention and their execution visible rather than implied. This is not a technical skill in any superficial sense. It is a practice of attention: returning to the page with the question of whether what you meant is actually there, rather than whether it sounds like it should be.
The reader’s half of the problem
Communication is not solely the writer’s responsibility to close this gap. Readers bring their own interpretive frameworks — their assumptions about genre, about the writer’s purpose, about what counts as relevant in a given context. Grice’s insight about cooperative communication acknowledged this: listeners are not passive receivers but active inferrers. They work to make sense of what they hear or read, filling in gaps using what they know about context and convention.
Where that interpretive work goes wrong is in over-correction: when readers supply meaning that the writer never intended, confidently misreading a text because their own framework led them elsewhere. The result is a different kind of gap — not the failure to express, but the failure to anticipate how expression will be received. A piece of writing intended as playful critique lands as contempt. A cautious recommendation reads as unqualified praise.
The words were chosen carefully; they were chosen for the wrong reader.
What this demands of writers — particularly writers who communicate across contexts or audiences — is not just clarity about what they mean but precision about what a given reader is likely to infer. These are related but not identical. A sentence can be clear to one reader and opaque to another not because of the words chosen but because of what those words trigger. The editorial work of anticipating misreading is some of the most difficult revision there is, because it requires imagining not just a blank reader but a specific one — and then asking what that reader, with their particular assumptions, will do with the text in front of them.
Most writers, most of the time, are writing for themselves: for the version of a reader who already understands their intent, who shares their context, who reads the words as the writer reads them. The discipline of closing the gap between intent and expression is the discipline of writing for someone else entirely.
