How writing makes me a better software engineer, in 500 words

I don't know if a good communicator is a better coder too, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are faster at conceptualising their code. People who have poor communication skills often have difficulty in verbalising their thoughts articulately because anxiety and other emotions impair them temporarily.

Well you gotta be able to write a jira issue. Or read someone else and know what to do.

Writing helps in the design process.

If you can't easily and lucidly describe in words how a system works, people will have trouble using it. In which case, you should probably consider a re-design or at least some modifications.

I don't see why programmers generally think writing is unrelated to programming.

In the transition from logic gates, to machine codes, to assembly, to higher level languages like C, Java, Perl, Python.. the evolution is most often towards an abstraction or syntax closer to natural language.

And if the software industry prefers programming languages that at least superficially resemble natural languages, shouldn't it be obvious that we should actually start with the presumption that, the skills that make one good at writing (natural languages) can translate to skills writing programming languages?

I've seen otherwise great engineers who write illegible code (that works). Their written language skills are often not that great either.

Hacker culture actually has a strong writing tradition. In the 90s it was zines, now its blogs.