One of advantages of writing is that it can give people - writers and readers - the time needed to reflect, to formulate thoughts carefully, to ensure thoroughness and nuance. Studies of written communication (including our own work) have show this. Very interestingly, this idea is corroborated by scholars who have studied the other fundamental modality of communication, oral exchanges. Thus, David Gibson's recent Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2012) examines the deliberations of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council during the height of the crisis in October 1962.
Gibson's careful analysis shows the twists and turns of the decision-making process in which all the alternatives considered had strong downsides. He also shows how the "conversational machinery" is not conducive to systematic comparison of alternatives. This is because of the expectation that interactants say something relevant to the last point made, and because of the conventions of turn-taking. As Gibson concludes in a Nature article about his book, "talk is useful for decision-making, but its conventions do not ensure that sustained attention is given to all the things that could go wrong."
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a high-stakes, high-time pressure situation in which the oral communication modality shows its limits. Given the urgency of the situation, the written modality would not have been more adapted. However, in less urgent conditions, the machinery of writing, its mechanisms - for ex., the objectification of one's thoughts and thought process, the process of reflection - may be more conducive to systematic comparisons and even to more rational decision-making.
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