The pitch exercise was a definite aid in reassessing my topic. While I'm still headlining "Why do women say sorry?" as the final umbrella question, I think I will now make it clear as a subtitle of sorts that, when I ask this, I mean especially in comparison to the reasons men say it, and how often. That was probably already implicit, but you can never be too sure. I made it a running theme in my pitch presentation, which you can read a transcribed version of here.
When it comes to other writing assignments, I think it depends on the medium of the work. Something like an academic essay, in my opinion, is something that benefits more from one-on-one time with an advisor — not that you could never translate your essay into an oral presentation (this podcast project is somewhat like that!), but that in the development/pitching stages, you might be more comfortable refining it several times over in a more private space. For pretty much anything else, however, I definitely think it would help — as pointed out in our pitching lecture, it really does motivate you to put more thought into it than you might have if you were just sketching broad ideas in Word, or even on a blog like this one. There's a whole other level of convincing both yourself and your audience when you're essentially performing, so absolutely, as far as more creative mediums go, I think it's a productive idea, and that's speaking as someone who gets very anxious about public speaking! I don't think the nerves will ever ebb away, but I didn't feel as much pressure for this as I have re: previous presentations because there was such a refreshing emphasis on there being room for improvement and the key being engagement/passion/etc. If anything, presenting something as a polished whole can be much more terrifying, since people tend to expect it to be near-perfect — a creative pitch, however, is more like a prologue to the full novel. It's a baby step, and you're meant to learn as you go.
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