Somehow, in some way, someone invented a variant of crosswords where instead of regular clues you get half-definition half-wordplay clues where you're not told which half is which. It can be thought of as a separate language that tries to look like English.
Stealing an example from another cryptic crossword because I don't know how to judge my own fairly, "Trials you confused with ceremonies (7)", "confused" is a common keyword for rearranging letters, so I look at "trials" with 6 letters and the "you" meaning the letter U. Trials + U can be rearranged to form "rituals", which fits the definition of "ceremonies".
Another one from the same crossword is "Reasoning found in ship's journal, I see (5)", which combines "log" + "i" + "c" to form "logic". There usually aren't indicators for concatenation. This details the common types of things to look for:
Stealing an example from another cryptic crossword because I don't know how to judge my own fairly, "Trials you confused with ceremonies (7)", "confused" is a common keyword for rearranging letters, so I look at "trials" with 6 letters and the "you" meaning the letter U. Trials + U can be rearranged to form "rituals", which fits the definition of "ceremonies".
Another one from the same crossword is "Reasoning found in ship's journal, I see (5)", which combines "log" + "i" + "c" to form "logic". There usually aren't indicators for concatenation.
This details the common types of things to look for: