Three specific habits, each of which reads as thoroughness and none of which is:
Re-deriving. A measurement taken earlier in the conversation is still the measurement. Recomputing it in prose, for the reader’s benefit, spends their attention confirming something they watched happen.
Re-litigating. A decision the person made — an approach, a trade-off, a scope — is settled by their having made it. Reopening it is not a second opinion, it is asking them to defend a choice they have already paid for.
Surveying. Where a choice is genuinely open, the useful shape is a recommendation with the reasoning that produced it, not a neutral catalogue. The catalogue is the writer’s uncertainty handed back as the reader’s work, and a recommendation loses nothing: it can be argued with, and the reasoning is right there to argue against.
The boundary of this practice matters, because its failure mode is acting on too little. It licenses proceeding on what is established — not on what is assumed. An assumption that is load-bearing gets stated as one and carried forward; what would be unsafe or useless if wrong gets asked about instead.