i run 2 article directories and both of them relied on submission of articles that I wrote directing the traffic back at those 2 directories, and one was just registerd like in 2 months it rose to pr3 from pr0 both me and the previous owner can attest to that as I bought the said domain from another np user via np$ payment
Writing articles is a great way to recieve backlinks. I'm not a great writer but I had my friend write one up. A month of so later, I found a few blogs using my article which lead back to my site. It's defintely worth your time writing an article up and there are defintely a lot of article directories out there that will accept your piece of work.
Articles definitely help in getting a lot of backlinks. When you submit your articles to some article directories, eventually other article directories will republish your articles, and soon there will be hundreds of places where your article can be found, and therefore hundreds of free backlinks!
Got me some great permanent deep links as well as traffic for my sites. But do remember, the article should be original and well written with no grammatical mistakes and should be rich in seo content.