It helps you analyze concepts, definitions, arguments and problems. It contributes to your capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from masses of information. Studying philosophy helps you put problems in a manageable form, frame hypotheses, and do research. It helps you both to distinguish fine differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions. And it helps you synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into a unified whole.
Philosophy contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers.
Once you have mastered those texts, you'll have the ability and confidence to handle most any text thrown your way. Through its focus on clear formulations, good arguments, and apt examples, the study of philosophy helps you develop the ability to be convincing. You learn to build and defend your own views, to appreciate competing positions, and to indicate forcefully why you consider your views preferable to alternatives. While many fields give you practice in arguing for your position, philosophy is unique in its focus on the quality of the arguments themselves. Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, are philosophical in nature.