A clue to reading Derrida: the sheer volume of it. Some 40 books, plus hundreds of articles, interviews, chapters in other books. You don't write so much by being precious about every word and painstakingly reshaping every sentence. Lots of his work comes from or develops out of seminars and lectures, and keeps within it the improvisation of the speaking voice. A virtuosic improvisation, to be sure, but one which reserves for itself the right to explore byways, to put things on hold, to discover by saying them things it hadn't fully known before.
Look at the syntax: phrases jostling each other in the loose apposition of commas, each one a slightly different way of naming whatever it is they are all talking of; qualifications, and qualifications to those, and the qualifications picked up and turned around and developed before returning us to the main argument; repetitions, and close repetitions, each slightly different as a new aspect comes to view. It's thinking on your feet.* Derridean syntax is an improvised ballet of concepts.
* Thanks to Peter Thomas in conversation. It's exactly the right phrase.
