Granted, I'm speaking with no neuroscience or psychological background, but anecdotally I think I completely disagree. I'm not saying that you should be the ne

Granted, I'm speaking with no neuroscience or psychological background, but anecdotally I think I completely disagree. I'm not saying that you should be the next Robert Penn Warren or James Joyce if you're writing about an endofunctor or something, but I genuinely do think that learning how to write fairly well has actually made me understand mathematics and computer science better, in addition to becoming better at explaining it. My thoughts can be all over the place, and even if I know every single "fact" about a subject, I feel like writing about it (and in particular trying to write well about it) helps me fully realize how these facts actually relate to each other, and building a bigger mental picture that I might not otherwise have. To be clear, I don't think writing is the only way of doing this. I think, for example, getting good at data visualization or learning formal mathematics can also have similar effects in regards to most forms of engineering. I just think that getting good at writing about a subject is a one of many really useful tools for developing an understanding of a subject.