Have you abandoned this now? Do you understand what I’m pointing out in terms of presentation?

Note: To repeat; nothing to do with the content. The point being if you’re not engaging with your target audience then the content doesn’t matter because no one will be willing to read further.

If you want critique of your ‘ideas’ that won’t happen until you improve how to present them. It’s bloody hard work, and for the most part the process won’t be particularly rewarding or fun because you’ll have to cut away swathes of yourself as you refine and remake how you think/articulate to the point where you can be your own audience rather than simply throwing ideas at a wall without considering at better technique to make them stick.

Sometimes the fault is mostly with the reader and sometimes the fault is with the author. There is always some fault in both. You have to be honest with yourself and with your audience. Very few people will just pick something up and read it start to finish. People may select something at random, but they decide relatively quickly whether or not they are going to continue reading or move on.

The narrower your target audience the harder it will be to judge the impact of your words. If you’re writing for academia then you need to study academic writings in your area of interest. If there is no ‘area of interest’ and what you have is ‘original’ you just have to accept the fact that it’s not ‘original’ but simply ‘unwanted’. That doesn’t have anything to do with the ‘value’ of your writing though.

Note: You may find it both interesting and useful to look at literary theory, and to research different forms and styles of writing - maybe practice writing the same thing for different audiences (for early teens, adults, students, teachers, professionals, amateurs, intellectuals, etc.,.)

I haven't abandoned anything, I just have very limited time to do things on the computer these days, and haven't had time to say or do anything productive in response to any of this yet. (Your advice seems to be to scrap the entire project and do something else in place of it, or at least to recreate it entirely in a different style, so I don't know what kind of productive response you expect to see in two days anyway).

I will share this one thought I had though, which sounded too defensive to share before but since you're getting impatient for a response:

Throughout the history of human civilization we have found ourselves struggling with numerous questions, be these intellectual, moral and/or socially concerned... — I like sushi

This sounds to me (and my English major girlfriend) like the start of a bad high school paper.

I also asked her to read the new intro I wrote, and she said that it gets a lot better in the second section -- i.e. the section that goes back to the old style that the whole intro used to be in, before I rewrote the first section trying to address your critiques.

All in all this makes me wary of the value of your stylistic critique. (She straight up says I should ignore you, but I can't bring myself to ignore anybody outright; I always try to take something of value away from any criticism).

She straight up says I should ignore you — Pfhorrest

I second that.

She straight up says I should ignore you — Pfhorrest

I second that. — jamalrob

That is heartening to hear, thanks.

:cool:

BTW, if anybody cares to read the abandoned attempt to write this in narrative / dialogue form from about a decade ago, you can find that here:

http://geekofalltrades.org/codex/xindex.php#intro

Be forewarned, I am absolute crap at writing dialogue, which is why that version of the project was abandoned.

Also, the ideas presented in that are not all my current ones.

I wasn’t being impatient? Just said that in relation to your other post where you made explicit your waxing and waning on this project.

You sound like you have the right attitude as does your gf. She’s meant to encourage you and support you. I’m not here to support you and encourage you in anything like the same manner.

Again, I’m not the one asking for a critique, but you are? I gave a quick example of how to engage with the reader quickly. Given that you missed the point of it I’ll make this clearer ...

1) Gist sentence about subject matter.
2) Pose a problem to the reader and hint/show ‘value’ - things like ‘many people,’ ‘but,’ and ‘although’. Why should the reader care?
3) Questions make the subject more concrete and actively engage with the reader - rather than passively absorbing words.
4) Avoid long lists, especially in an introduction to the subject matter.
5) State position as clearly as possible before explaining why you have this position.

When I said ‘high-school’ I meant that in such essays you are writing to show comprehension. If you’re writing a book/essay you’re writing for your audience and given the subject matter you have to address the audience differently because the audience is different.

I’m still unsure what your aim is. You seem to be writing something that is an introduction to philosophy, an educational resource, your own personal philosophical view, and a critique of philosophy in general. If it’s educational (textbook) then terms like ‘I’/‘we’/‘us’ should be avoided as much as possible. I don’t need to know about your personal story or journey; I don’t care (in terms of a educational piece of writing.

If you’re going for something more like ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ though, I’d certainly go into more personal detail.

The thrust of what I’m saying is that I don’t know who this is for and I not convinced you do yet either. I’m getting mixed messages due to how it is lain out. The ‘set up’ matters a lot because people like to know what they are getting themselves into.

My own critique of my critique here would be to say I should really give positive feedback too. I like a lot of the content because I’ve looked at your essays before. I judged you to be someone less concerned with compliments and more likely to take criticism seriously if it was straight up - if you were a student it would be a different matter and I’d likely use a more ‘encouraging’ tone.

Trying to go to sleep but a quick partial response...

The thrust of what I’m saying is that I don’t know who this is for and I not convinced you do yet either. I’m getting mixed messages due to how it is lain out. The ‘set up’ matters a lot because people like to know what they are getting themselves into. — I like sushi

I just gave an explanation of the target in the other thread.

(edit to quote it here for posterity:)

Before I even knew what philosophy was, I was looking for something. Something fundamental. I didn’t know what to call it.

When I discovered philosophy, I thought that that field was the place where I would find what I was looking for, and that that was the name of what I was looking for: a philosophy. The right one.

I didn’t find it. But I found lots of partial attempts at it, and partially successful attempts at it, and generally, altogether, most of the parts of it. They just needed to be shaped and polished a bit, assembled together in the right way, and a few gaps filled in.

That’s what my book is meant to be: the thing I came to philosophy looking for, but never found. And it’s targeted at people like me from 20 years ago, who are looking for the same thing I was, and who have just learned that something called “philosophy” is where something like that may be found, but don’t yet know the first thing about it. — Pfhorrest

My own critique of my critique here would be to say I should really give positive feedback too. I like a lot of the content because I’ve looked at your essays before. I judged you to be someone less concerned with compliments and more likely to take criticism seriously if it was straight up - if you were a student it would be a different matter and I’d likely use a more ‘encouraging’ tone. — I like sushi

Thanks for that, but it’s really not the lack of compliment that’s been discouraging, but how the gist of your critique has seemed less “here is how to do this better” and more “don’t do that, do something else instead”; and also shades of “don’t argue, just do it, or pay someone else to critique this for you”.

I would like to instead explain what I am trying to communicate (which is not arguing with the critique) and get suggestions on how that could be better communicated.

When I have the time at my desk, not on my phone in bed.

The straightforward latin noun for question or inquiry is 'quaestio' , genitive plural quaestiōnum
The Book of Questions - Liber / codex quaestionum

quaerendī is the masculine genitive singular of the verb future participle quaerendus
The Book of What is to be Asked - Liber / codex quaerendī

quaerentis is masculine genitive singular of the verb present participle quaerens
The Book of Questioning - Liber / codex quaerentis

So you have got the choice :)

Thanks for that! I think the last is what I’m going for: it’s a book on the topic of the act of questioning.

I would like to instead explain what I am trying to communicate (which is not arguing with the critique) and get suggestions on how that could be better communicated. — Pfhorrest

So here's a quick attempt at that, looking at the current version post-revisions-based-on-your-critique:

"It may be hopeless, but I'm trying anyway."

This is the moral of the story, so to speak. It's the maxim that everything boils down to. It's also catchy. (Someone in the other thread liked it as catch phrase, and my girlfriend said it caught her attention immediately). I hoped it would make people ask "what is hopeless? what are you trying?"

"Trying to live a meaningful life, by empowering and enlightening myself and others. Trying to bolster and support the right institutes of governance and education, that will best promote justice and knowledge, helping bring ours wills and our minds into alignment with what is moral and what is real. Trying to understand what it even means for something to be moral or for something to be real, by understanding the language we use to even discuss any of this, and all that that entails about logic and rhetoric, mathematics and the arts. "

The book is about philosophy. These are the things philosophy is about, so these are the things the book is about. Three sentences, for the three general sections of topics, in reverse order: the practical how-to-live-your-life stuff, the core sequences about reality/knowledge and morality/justice, and the abstract communication stuff. They're in reverse order to start with the stuff people might care more about, the less abstract stuff, first, even though in the book itself I have to start with the abstract stuff to ground the more practical stuff.

"Maybe that endeavor is hopeless. Maybe life is meaningless, all social institutes are incorrigibly corrupt, justice and knowledge are impossible, the mind and will powerless to grasp what is real or what is moral, if anything is at all, if it even makes any sense to try to talk about such things. Maybe that's all hopeless. But just in case it's not, I think we stand a better chance of succeeding at that endeavor, should success be at all possible, if we act on the assumption that it's not hopeless, and we try anyway. "

This is that 'moral of the story', applied to that subject matter. These are the things at stake. Meaningless, incorrigible corruption, impossibility, powerlessness, incomprehensible nonsense, etc, are the threats posed by lack of a good philosophy. But I'm offering hope against those, in the face of apparent hopelessness.

"That is the core principle at the heart of my philosophy, that I am to elaborate in the following essays: to always try, and so to act under whatever assumptions trying tacitly necessitates, namely that success is always possible, but never guaranteed. I consider the general philosophical view supported by that principle to be a naively uncontroversial, common-sense kind of view, from which various other philosophical schools of thought deviate in different ways. In these essays I aim to shore up and refine that common-sense view into a more rigorous form that can better withstand the temptation of such deviation, and to show the common error underlying all of those different deviations from this common-sense view."

Restating the kind of thing I'm going to do in the book: defend the common-sense view that things aren't completely hopeless/meaningless/etc, using that core principle.

"Put most succinctly, that common error is assuming the false dichotomy that either there must be some unquestionable answers, or else we will be left with some unanswerable questions. All of the deviations from the view I defend stem ultimately from falling to one side or the other of that false dichotomy, on some topic or another, because doing so in either way constitutes a failure to even try to genuinely answer the relevant questions. In contrast, my philosophy is the view that we must always try to answer our questions, and must therefore always proceed on the assumption that there are no unanswerable questions, and no unquestionable answers; that every question can in principle be answered, and every proposed answer is open to question."

Overview of what is wrong with the competition, and why what I'm offering is better.

"Very loosely speaking, that means that there are correct answers to be had for all meaningful questions, both about reality and about morality, and that we can in principle differentiate those correct answers from the incorrect ones; and that those correct answers are not correct simply because someone decreed them so, but rather, they are independent of anyone's particular opinions, and grounded instead in our common experience. Put another way: that what is true and what is good are beyond the decree of any of us, yet within reach of each of us; and that we can in principle always eventually tell whether someone's opinion is right or wrong, but we can never immediately assume any opinion to be such, and must give each the benefit of the doubt until proof is found one way or the other."

Overview of what the thing I'm offering is, in more detail.

"That general philosophical view is the underlying reason I will give for all of my more specific philosophical views: everything that follows does so as necessary to conform to that broad general philosophy, rejecting any views that require either just taking someone's word on some question or else giving up all hope of ever answering such a question, settling on whatever views remain in the wake of that rejection.

The core principles I will outline have immediate implications about what kinds of things are real, what kinds of things are moral, the methods of attaining knowledge, and the methods of attaining justice, which will each be covered in their own essays. Those positions then raise immediate questions about the nature of the mind and the will, and the legitimacy of educational and governmental institutes, which will again each be covered in their own essays. But all of that first requires a framework of linguistic meaning to make any sense of, which will be covered in its own essay, along with attendant essays on the related topics of logic and mathematics, and rhetoric and the arts, each covering different facets of communication in more detail. And with all of that in place, we finally have the background to tackle the most practical questions of enlightenment, empowerment, and leading a meaningful life, each of which will be covered in its own essay as well."

Structural overview of the rest of the book to follow.

"For these far-reaching influences, I see philosophy as the most central field of study, bridging the most abstract of topics like language, math, and the arts, to the physical and ethical sciences that in turn support the development of all the tools used to do the jobs of all the world's various trades. It is in light of that pragmatic role of philosophy that I will begin my approach to the subject, and it was likewise that centrality that initially drew me to it."

Another take on why this subject is important, and segue to the next section where I explain why I found this important and how and why I'm sharing it with others now.

...

That's the first section for now, gotta run.

Put that in your intro then and dump the other opening because it doesn’t work (I would recommend you change one of the iterations of ‘something’ though).

You seem not to have actually read that post at all, because that is the "other" opening (the one that's currently up, that you were critiquing before), with commentary on what it's trying to communicate, in case you wanted to offer suggestions on how that could be better communicated. Which I said in the quoted bit at the very start of that post.

It was a response to this:

Before I even knew what philosophy was, I was looking for something. Something fundamental. I didn’t know what to call it.

When I discovered philosophy, I thought that that field was the place where I would find what I was looking for, and that that was the name of what I was looking for: a philosophy. The right one.

I didn’t find it. But I found lots of partial attempts at it, and partially successful attempts at it, and generally, altogether, most of the parts of it. They just needed to be shaped and polished a bit, assembled together in the right way, and a few gaps filled in.

That’s what my book is meant to be: the thing I came to philosophy looking for, but never found. And it’s targeted at people like me from 20 years ago, who are looking for the same thing I was, and who have just learned that something called “philosophy” is where something like that may be found, but don’t yet know the first thing about it. — Pfhorrest

Oh okay. I'll look for a way to work something like that in then.

This is the moral of the story, so to speak. It's the maxim that everything boils down to. — Pfhorrest

Yet all you give the reader is this:

It may be hopeless, but I'm trying anyway. — Pfhorrest

For a novel, yes it’s an intriguing opening. For a philosophical work I don’t care for it and it doesn’t tell me anything directly ... remember this is the opening sentence. If it’s the maxim of the book then why not simply state that it is the maxim of the book?

I literally said I do the same thing (ie. Not try hard enough, and that being human is the reason for this). The little bit at the end was directed at all humans. We try to try, to keep trying to try. The :D means *joke*

I think you’re just upset because you claimed you were looking for something yet did your best to avoid it. It happens, and it will happen again to you and me both. I’m not at all sorry if I touched a nerve. Sometimes things are better said than not and if in this instance I shouldn’t have pointed out what I pointed out it’s moot now - I said as I saw fit because I get upset seeing myself and others miss what’s right under their noses.

I don’t hold grudges because I know everyone has a necessary capacity to change - for better or worse. If may ‘feel’ like I attacked you, but I didn’t attack you because I don’t know you.

I spent the first half hour of free computer time I've had in days trying to adjust my work in light of your criticism and that's "not trying hard enough"?

Not devoting that tiny bit of time to your meaningless "chair" exercise instead is not "trying my best to avoid" actually constructive collaboration on something that means something to me.

I try enough because I try as much as I can, and if the results aren't enough then tough shit, I'll try again when I can and see if it gets better.

You're not my fucking boss, this isn't my fucking job, this is a passion project I do when I can as best I can, and I know it's not enough, it's not enough for me, and I don't need you fucking telling me it's not enough for you, because your opinion doesn't fucking matter.

You've outed yourself as a concern troll. You pretend to care so that your attacks will hurt more. You're not worth the pixels your words are printed on. From here on out I'm considering you a hostile actor not to be trusted.

I'm looking for people who like what it is that I'm trying to do and have thoughts on how I can do it better. It seems you don't think I should be even trying to do this, and your only thoughts are on how it's awful, with no constructive suggestions for how to make it better.

I'm looking for people who like what it is that I'm trying to do and have thoughts on how I can do it better. It seems you don't think I should be even trying to do this, and your only thoughts are on how it's awful, with no constructive suggestions for how to make it better. — Pfhorrest

This isn’t true at all. You asked for criticism and I’ve clearly offered constructive criticism.

Anyway, you’ve made yourself clear enough. If you have a change of heart let me know, if not no problem. I’ll not be bothering you anymore than I have appeared to already.

I like sushi has a point Pfhorrest. From experience of my own, here is some advice about seeking feedback on your writing;
1. Do not expect useful literary criticism from anybody close to you emotionally. There are reasons why they have that connection to you, all of them sincere, and that are likely to bias their approach to your writing whether they are aware of that bias or not. That bias may, of course, be negative or positive.
2. Find someone close enough to your target audience as you can and who has no, or very little, vested interest in your emotional wellbeing, and ask them to devote some time to reading your work. You will no doubt have a clear picture of that kind of individual, so you can perhaps identify a suitable person or some suitable people within your circle of loose acquaintances. You might find such a person on this board, but I have my doubts. When you do find that person, ask that they be brutally honest and convince them that you have a thick skin, even if you don't. Do not expect that person to advise you what to do to improve the book, you are writing it, not them. When they do come back to you with a list of problems, and from personal experience with following this advice myself, they are likely to have quite a number of them, address those issues yourself and try to convince them to reread your work to see if they believe it has improved.

On a different note, if you goal is to see this book in print and to be published by someone other than yourself, you need to be able to convince a literay agent that you have a target audience that is crystal clear from a marketing point of view, and sufficiently large to give a chance that there will be some profit to be made. Agents and publishers are in it for the money, although perhaps not exclusively. What you have said about your target audience seems to me to be too nebulous to meet those commercial requirements.

Of course, if you don't care about seeing the book in print, and you are doing this just for yourself, then I do not see why you need the advice of anyone concerning your writing style, just keep writing and rewriting and make of yourself your own worst literary critic.

:up:

@Pfhorrest

@jkg20 is spot on.

Sushi made it obvious from the start he didn't give a shit about your feelings and was just going to say what he was going to say. Which is exactly what you should ideally expect (and hope for) in criticism.

As an aside, I've just finished re-editing and relaunching a book of short stories, which I put a lot a lot of work into and which I've been highly emotionally invested in. But it took me over a year to go back and see some of the fuckups in there because it can take that long away from a creative project to divest yourself of bias and look on it in a way similar to a detached critic. Of course, you'll never be fully objective, but you'll get nowhere without giving yourself time to be so. Your reaction to Sushi suggests you're not there yet. But if you want your work to be better, you need to get there. That's just the way it is.

Also, you're not even supposed to be promoting your own work here or getting feedback on it. Normally, I delete that kind of stuff as self-promotion/advertising. And now I've got another good reason, which is people getting pissed off that everyone doesn't love their stuff as much as they do.

2. Find someone close enough to your target audience as you can and who has no, or very little, vested interest in your emotional wellbeing, and ask them to devote some time to reading your work. You will no doubt have a clear picture of that kind of individual, so you can perhaps identify a suitable person or some suitable people within your circle of loose acquaintances. — jkg20

Nobody in my close circle of friends seems to be that kind of individual. I would generally characterize that kind of individual as “philosophy fans”: non-experts with an interest in the field, the kind of people who might otherwise be philosophy students. I thought a forum like this would be full of them.

Do not expect that person to advise you what to do to improve the book, you are writing it, not them. — jkg20

I don’t understand what to do to improve something when the feedback is just “I don’t like this” or “I don’t understand this” and any attempt to get more details about what or why is taken as defensive. When I have tried just blindly rewriting something from scratch, like I did for sushi, the response was just more “I don’t like this”. I don’t even know if the change was in the right direction or the wrong direction. I have no idea where to proceed from feedback like that.

On a different note, if you goal is to see this book in print and to be published by someone other than yourself — jkg20

It’s not. I don’t see what the point of that would be, I’m not doing this for money, I’m trying to give away something useful to the world.

Sushi made it obvious from the start he didn't give a shit about your feelings and was just going to say what he was going to say. — Baden

It’s not about him not caring about my feelings. I was trying to work with his criticism, as useless as it was, as best I could. I was trying to get better clarification on what kind of change would be more in the direction he wanted. I had just finished another round of attempting to adjust for his comments and came here to say so only to find that he had just attacked not the work but my character (in the other thread), saying I’m not trying hard enough. That personal attack is the only thing that made me angry.

And now I've got another good reason, which is people getting pissed off that everyone doesn't love their stuff as much as they do. — Baden

I never expected anyone to love it. I think I’m garbage and everything I make is garbage. (Even that game mod that lots of people love still looks like garbage to me). All I hope for is someone to find it interesting garbage with potential and give constructive feedback on how to make it less garbage.

And as I said, I only got pissed at the personal attack on my character, not the criticism of my work.

It’s not. I don’t see what the point of that would be, I’m not doing this for money, I’m trying to give away something useful to the world.

I did not say or imply that you were in it for the money. Publishers and agents are. You might, however; want your work published to reach a wider audience than a bunch of insomniancs with nothing better to do than try to prove other people are interpreting Wittgenstein incorrectly. If you do want to do that, you will need to have a sharper target in sight than just "people who in other cicumstances might have been philsophy students". If you sharpen your target you may also have to sharpen the focus of the work, of course, and turn it into something with more limited scope.

In any case, if your target audience is people interested in philosophy, then my single piece of advice to you, and I think Sushi made much the same point, and which you can certainly do something about very easily without affecting the content, is to depersonalise it. The "I" count is very high in the sample chapters I have skimmed through and, speaking as a person interested in philosophy, it is off putting.

You might, however; want your work published to reach a wider audience — jkg20

The audience of people willing to pay for something is wider than the audience of people willing to read something for free? That seems counter-intuitive.

depersonalise it. The "I" count is very high — jkg20

I still think this advice is countermanded by people with better standing to give such advice, such as all of my philosophy professors, who explicitly instructed everyone that philosophy is written from the first person; and a survey of most of the historical philosophical literature, which bears out that instruction, being written in the first person unless it's a dialogue or some kind of literature review not putting forward its own arguments.

I understand that other kinds of disciplines, and high school teachers apparently, drill first-person writing out of people, which is why the philosophy professors have explicitly hammered on how that kind of advice is to be ignored for the sake of philosophical writing.

I just did a quick search for philosophical writing advice and found these choice quotes:

“Philosophers often use the first person, especially when announcing their argument.”
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/wp-content/uploads/sites/164/2016/10/phil-papers-handout.pdf

Some examples of “good writing”:
“In this paper, I will refute Smith’s argument against the existence of free will by showing that it trades on an ambiguity.“
“ As I have shown clearly in my reconstruction of Smith’s argument, the word “free” as it appears in Smith’s
first premise (meaning uncaused) must be interpreted differently from the word “free” as it appears in Smith’s third premise (meaning unforced) – otherwise at least one of those premises would be highly implausible. But in that case, Smith’s argument is logically invalid.
It might be objected that I have interpreted Smith’s argument unfavorably. I can think of only one other reasonable interpretation of Smith’s argument. It uses the same first two premises but...”
https://philosophy.fas.harvard.edu/files/phildept/files/brief_guide_to_writing_philosophy_paper.pdf

All of this article generally:
https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/should-i-use-i/

Also of interest:

“There is no need to point out that your topic is an important one, and one that has interested philosophers for hundreds of years.”
http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/resources/writing.html

It kind of sounds like many of you have never actually written a philosophy paper and are running on old high school writing rules.

my philosophy professors, who explicitly instructed everyone that philosophy is written from the first person;

Questionable advice, and in any case open to interpretation. The suggestion was not that you should, or even could, write without dropping in the odd first person pronoun here and there where it makes sense. However, your use of it seems extravagant and very often entirely unnecessary. Compare your use of it with, say, Kant's and perhaps you will see. In any case, you wanted opinions from people interested in philosophy and who read philosophy, and, being such a person, I gave you one. What you do with it is entirely up to you.

@PfhorrestPerhaps you have edited your replies without indicating as much or perhaps a short night's sleep has made me come at this with a fresh set of eyes, in either case, there are links and suggestions in your remarks above now that I did not take into account last night, so I have taken the liberty of editing my earlier remarks.

Please do read, or reread, the "should I use 'I'" article you provided. As you do so, ask yourself the question whether you might be using the first person pronoun so much that you undermine any potentially positive effects of doing so.

It kind of sounds like many of you have never actually written a philosophy paper and are running on old high school writing rules.

I will not speak for the others contributing to this thread, but I have written more philosophy papers than I care to count and have read even more. Some of them were better than others, but none of them were better because the first person pronoun had been scattered around the pages like confetti. When I taught undergraduate philosophy, I certainly advised people to try to put things into their own words, find their own examples to replace the ones contained in the set texts, come up with questions that express what it is that they did not understand about some philosopher's remarks, and so on. To some extent, that is adopting a first person approach to writing philosophy, but does not require excessive use of "I" in its execution. I also advised on many occasions that where one sentence will do in place of five, opt for brevity. Many, if not all, of my colleagues were in the habit of dealing out very similar counsel.

On a different note, unless you are doing so with express intent, avoid splitting infintives. Some people, of course, intend to split their infinitives and on rare occasions doing so enhances a sentence. However, if you are doing it without that intent, then just bear in mind that sometimes the careless splitting of an infinitive can lead to unwelcome ambiguity and not simply to stylistic discomfort. Also, beginning sentences with conjunctions is mostly to be avoided: conjunctions have the grammatical purpose of conjoining two or more phrases in a single sentence. Finally, in the absence of its serving some essential end or its being unavoidable, eschew using the same word more than once in a sentence. Such repitition smacks of laziness, engenders boredom and can indicate to the reader that you lack vocabularly. You could also extend that last rule of thumb to cover a whole paragraph. Here is one sentence of yours where you go against all of the foregoing advice:

But I am not saying to automatically reject all claims made by all authorities. — Pfhorrest

Perhaps this is the one and only time you break those guidelines of grammar and style in so few words. However, on the off chance that the aforementioned quotation is indicative of your writing generally, you might want to look up those three pieces of advice on the internet and see if anyone else agrees with them or not.

... philosophy is written from the first person — Pfhorrest

How about 'first person impersonal' (e.g. Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Peirce, Russell ... Nussbaum, Meillassoux, et al)? Less 'systemic' memoir, more autopsy ... of reflection / reasoning. :chin:

... a bunch of insomniancs with nothing better to do than try to prove other people are interpreting Wittgenstein incorrectly. — jkg20

:up: "Drinks for all my friends!" ~Henry Chinaski, Barfly

:death: :flower:

:ok:

Less 'systemic' memoir, more autopsy ... of reflection / reasoning.

Well expressed.

"Drinks for all my friends!" ~Henry Chinaski, Barfly

Cheers. Next round's on me as well.