That’s fantastic Patrick! It’s great to connect with another person who has personal experience studying philosophy and applying its concepts and techniques to writing. As you implicitly suggest, the actual doing of philosophy is incredibly beneficial to our intellectual development. What I term in this article “struggling through” arguments, which can refer to both the construction of one’s own arguments and the critical appraisal of others’ claims, is vital to cultivating the ability to systematically process ideas from beginning to end. I often stress to novice writers the principle that they must get things (mostly) straight in their “heads” before they can effectively put their thoughts to paper, so-to-speak. I say “(mostly) straight” because I do believe that the act of writing itself can help one clarify one’s own thoughts in real-time but this, of course, is a dialectical (back-and-forth) activity between thinking and writing rather than writing somehow divorced from conceptual activity.