Teaching Helps Writing

Research finds that science grad students who did research and taught improved their written research proposals over 1 academic year more than those who just researched. Differences in written quality "could not account for the results, because only specific skills among those analyzed showed improvement as a function of the teaching experience."

Writing is Emotional

Research finds that writing marginalizes brain activity in regions associated with emotional responses ... meaning writing can help you calm down.

Brains of people were examined as they looked at pictures of others who had positive or negative facial expressions. When asked to label the emotion, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex became active, a region associated with self-restraint. Only when people express emotions in words does activity arise in this region. Also, the more that region is activated, the less active are a variety of limbic regions associated with emotions