Personally, email debates with a friend have refined and sometimes changed my views as I reread my writing, finding and correcting weaknesses in the arguments before sending them back to the friend.
I think learning is always a choice and takes some mental effort- no one can force you to internalize a concept or belief even if they have complete control over your life. So the process of writing a thoughtful argument can help change beliefs because you have internalized both sides of the debate, so can accept either possible conclusion as your own.
On the other hand, maybe I'm just abnormal, or else deluded to think that writing causes self-examination. I like to think that my more strongly-held beliefs come from reading multiple books and articles on a topic and then synthesizing an opinion in writing to others. I like to think my beliefs don't come from advertisements like the "head-on" commercials or political signs displaying nothing but the candidate's name. And yet... I've also read studies showing that these simplistic ads work to change opinions, and I don't have a good reason to believe that I'm a special individual to whom statistics don't apply.
I also don't necessarily think that writing helps speaking or vice-versa, because speaking in normal conversation is fast-paced and contains less information, so requires good memory and quick recollection of previously considered arguments, while thoughtful writing requires more wide-ranging associative memory and use of logic to pull together diverse data into a novel argument.
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