I've had a long love-hate relationship with writing.
Growing up, writing was an art that I was heavily encouraged (and personally sought to) perfect, for reasons that were mostly academic.
I used fancy words and complex sentence structures without caring about content obfuscation to make my writing stand out, which in retrospect might not have been the best way to approach it. Yet I was praised for it --- for knowing all these forms, the art, if you will, the means of conveying meaning.
But deep down, I did not really feel satisfied. In some sense, the question of why, in an academic setting, we need to overcomplicate already complex ideas always lingered in the back of my mind.
(Like why do we need a 500-word minimum essay? Shouldn't we encouraged kids to be succint with their ideas? Anyways, the many discussions about the education I received growing up can be postponed for another day.)
Fast forward 10 years, and it's the complete opposite. I'm in grad school and constantly bombarded with academic papers.
Now clear, simple, non-fancy writing is what I constantly longed for given the complexity of the subject matter I need to read on a daily basis.
Writing is also therapy for someone like me who often struggle to communicate complex ideas. It is one of the few mediums which I can go back and correct myself before revealing my thoughts to others.
For instance, I can go back (I did) and add the context about how I'm in this situation because of the research I do on a daily basis which requires a lot of reading and writing, and perhaps even more rewriting.
Writing is merely the means of expressing one's thought, and so the quality is partially attributable to one's expression of ideas, and also on the matter of one's idea itself.
I don't recall when I encountered the quotes from Feynmann regarding simplicty, but I believe more and more that it's the hardest thing to do. My only hope is that if I write more, I will be better at organizing my ideas and expressing them simply, and perhaps this will translate to communicating them well in other forms (speech, etc.).
And I also get to log my thoughts and spend time building on them, and hopefully they stop coming up as I try to sleep :)