Tips for writing philosophical texts

Write a draft of one idea and ask for feedback, here or in PM/email to someone you think can evaluate it. People love giving advice.

Motivate the reader upfront with a description of payoff at the end of the trip, and an outline of the path to get there, and why that path is necessary to get to the payoff.

It's simply death for an article to start by introducing a bunch of concepts that the reader knows nothing about and has no idea why they're being presented.

You could point the reader to an existing text explaining the basic ideas, and present your original work as a reaction to, or commentary on, it,

With philosophy something that might seem too obvious to you might not be obvious to other people. Expressing obvious ideas in a clear manner is very useful.

Explore "The back of the napkin" by Dan Roam - it can prove useful

Ship it. Get feedback from some readers. Use feedback to improve your ideas and your writing. Repeat.

The best way to overcome this is to take 50 or so pages and give the reader a basic overview of the background. Limit your discussion to 200-300 years back if that applies. So for example, if I am going to talk about test for existence I will not start at Decartes I will start with Nietzche (less time to transpire). Philosphical texts also tend to be self filtering. The people who would read that sort of thing in most cases have read and therefore already have the necessary knowledge at the hand.

No concept is superflous if you are writing about it, that alone makes it important especially if you are saying something new or adding a new voice to the topic. That goes for being obvious. Often times the most obvious idea is a complete mystery to another person.

For example take the game of The Green Glass Door:

Behind the Green Door there is green, glass, and doors, There are wheels but no bikes, books but no writers, stuffed things, and so on. Get the idea?

When I first hear this game I couldn't make the connection but once he told me what it was it was like it slapped me in the fact and I didn't notice.

GAME SOLUTION: The world of the Green Glass Door only has things with double letters.

Present the complicated problem and then break it down into understandable parts. Much of philosophy is basic but not widely understood because it is obfuscated by multiple meanings and ends up arguing about definitions such as "What is consciousness?". It is helpful to disambiguate these questions by choosing an objective interpretation and then answering that. For example "What is consciousness?" can be defined as "What makes a creature aware of it's environment?" "What process produces thoughts?" "What process produces sensation"?