Here’s a different approach you can try.
Read an article.
Wait one to four days.
Write an informal rough draft article of your own about the same topic. Try to write based on your own understanding of the topic and your own reasoning, not your memory of specifics that you read (like article organization or phrasing used). You can use the dictionary but shouldn’t be using much else while writing, particularly not looking at philosophy texts.
The rough draft should take 1 hour max and be done in one writing session.
The goal is not to write something as good as the article or cover all the stuff in the article. Just write anything about some of the same topics that you think you understand well enough to explain.
If you’re not satisfied with it, wait one to four days, then write about the same topic again. Just start over with a blank page; don’t continue or edit the previous draft.
You can repeat this rewriting multiple times if desired.
When you’re reasonably satisfied or you don’t want to do it again, reread the article and compare it with what you wrote.
If you understand the articles, then you should be able to explain some of the main ideas in them in your own words without looking things up.
A variant approach, if you want to try it, is recording yourself explaining stuff out loud instead of writing about it. If you do this, feel free to pause and think. You can just let the recording keep going and have silences in it (it’s also ok to pause the recording sometimes if you want, but it might be easier not to worry about pausing and restarting, especially for small pauses). Don’t rush yourself. Don’t say “umm” to fill the silence (it’s no big deal if you say that sometimes). If you end up using this method a lot but don’t like playing back recordings with silent parts, there are technological solutions like https://getrecut.com or Rogue Amoeba | Audio Hijack: Record Any Audio on MacOS But probably don’t worry about those unless you’ve used the method a bunch and it’s working well apart from the recorded silences.
Yeah, focusing on one to three sub-topics at a time sounds good.
Also, writing your own stuff that’s different than what’s in the article is fine. It’s good to have some of your own thoughts and sometimes go off on tangents. Give yourself freedom to do that. If you don’t cover some aspect of the article that you still want to write about, you can return to it next time (and if you go on a tangent again, that’s ok, just return to it again the next time).
Instead of trying to make your writing come out a certain way, I think it’s important to give yourself freedom and permission to explore. You can start a writing session with a goal in mind, but if you go in a different direction, don’t worry about it. Once you start a writing session, it’s usually best to listen to your intuition. School doesn’t work that way and really tries to control what kind of writing output students have (teachers are really pushy that student writing follow the prompt/assignment, and don’t have them try the same prompt multiple times; they just get one try). But if you write more intuitively, it should generally be faster and easier. So you can end up writing 2-5 things for the same effort level as one more consciously controlled write. Reducing editing also increases how many things you can write. So then instead of one high-effort thing, you create several lower effort things and on average you’ll get a lower effort thing that fits the goal pretty well after using less time and effort, and also you’ll get some extra things written that are good for other goals.
To benefit from faster writing, you’ll sometimes want to write multiple things on the same day. The easiest way to make this work well is just write on different topics. Work on multiple projects at the same time. The reason is it can be hard to do two separate, different writes about the same topic without a break in between; without the break, your writing can be too repetitive. You want to return the topic with fresh eyes, and the easiest way to do that is generally to sleep at least once. It’s possible to accomplish in other ways but that can be harder, so probably don’t try it for now unless you get inspired and have a specific new thought that isn’t in the previous draft that you’re inspired to write about. Otherwise if you finish quickly and want to get more done today, you can just do more other stuff.
Let’s start here but if it’s not working let me know and we can try something else.