I do not see the fact that writing out one's thoughts as prose is one of the best and one of the only methods of comprehensively assessing any complex concept. What are the other methods that are not derivatives of "writing your thoughts down?" There are none I can think of right now. Compex anything left as "thoughts" and/or only verbalized is too easy to gloss over critical points that are easily focused upon when written down.
The fact that students and many people cannot write is because their thoughts are a disorganized mess, only held together by the self deception they are not a mess. Yet, attempting to write down their thoughts, the disorganization is easily seen and then they organize their thoughts through the process of writing legible prose. Writing is how many organize their thinking, and if they never wrote they'd never organize their thoughts.
Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion, and debugging them. That's been the core of the curriculum for about 2500 years.
The fact that students and many people cannot write is because their thoughts are a disorganized mess, only held together by the self deception they are not a mess. Yet, attempting to write down their thoughts, the disorganization is easily seen and then they organize their thoughts through the process of writing legible prose. Writing is how many organize their thinking, and if they never wrote they'd never organize their thoughts.