Writing is a odd process. It is recognized as one of the basic components of education: reading, 'riting' and 'rithmetic'. Roughly speaking, it is the only one of the three that is an art, the result of artistic endeavor by the author. Just as a painting is brush strokes and a sculpture is hammer strokes, so writing is pen or key strokes. Which strokes is up to the writer. I suppose most of the writing that has ever been done is meant to communicate to others, even though one can write for one's older self in a journal or diary.
I read that the earliest writing seems to be codes that described business transactions. I believe that the idea of each of us being a thinker and a source of ideas is itself a fairly recent development. So it has taken ages for the notion that any human is both capable of being a writer, mastering the complex spelling and writing conventions, and also a source of thoughts worthy of time, effort and ink to take root. I read within the last 10 years that 30% of the current world population is illiterate, not reading or writing any language. But the notion that we all benefit if all humans have the basics of education has proved valuable and contagious.
Older people are rightly concerned about their memories. Here is a Scientific American post on the value of writing as a tool for increasing retention of information: writing down what you can remember and then checking to see what important material was not included. The same article discusses another tool with an important purpose: lowering one's anxiety before a test, performance or other challenge: writing down a description and explanation of one's anxieties before the event.
I am interested in being in a good relation with my subconscious mind, to whatever extent is feasible. The book Instant Self Hypnosis by Forbes Blair advocates creating a written message to myself to be delivered to myself while in a trance. Both writing the message and reading it with strong concentration can assist in getting ideas, resolutions and images into the mind. My own hypnotist always emphasizes that all hypnosis is mostly self-hypnosis in that one gets into a trance in one's own mind. Her article on creating scripts for one's self is also about what writing can do.
Both reading and writing are surprisingly complex brain activities, so much so that it was thought not so long ago that a person needed a special talent to do them, much as we might think today of the ability to draw or sing. (Those abilities are being reconsidered as available to more of us than thought, too.) Just compare writing and reading in an ideographic system like Chinese, where the symbol represents an idea with using our phonographic system. In the one, I guess ideas are extracted and put together while in the other, sounds are extracted, converted into words and then ideas are inferred.
