Learning to read a map, a recipe or a wiring diagram is learning to read someone else’s mind.

Behind every diagram is a person who had to decide what you needed to know and what they could leave out. The contour lines, the order of the steps, the little symbol for a resistor: each one is a choice about how to hand over understanding on paper. Learning to follow it is partly learning to think the way its author thought.

Take any instructions in the house and notice what they assume you already know. Find the gap you had to fill in yourself. Then try writing your own set for something you can do well, and see how much of it is hard to say.