Comment by pacaro

It's definitely a rhetorical challenge, and even if TFA is using a poor analogy, it does serve to illustrate this problem, which feels to me like part of what it is trying to communicate.

I have a lot of experience thinking that I get the point of someone else's argument, and then realizing later that I didn't actually get the point, or not in a way that was useful to both parties in the conversation

When I don't feel understood it's usually because the counterparty hasn't said things that allow me to recognize that they have internalized what I'm trying to communicate

Changing tack a little, I think that this is one of the things that I admire about some legal writing, that they are intentionally addressing the act of communication in addition to the substance of what they are communicating. In addition there is a recognition that their words have consequence