Comment by slopinthebag
12 days ago
> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays
Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).
Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)
In uni, maybe. But my experience in middle/high school was that hitting the minimum word count was much more important than actually good writing.
The concept of word count in high school was bonkers. Knowing my teacher wouldn't check, I wrote a dense line with a lot of words, using small print and small words, and then used that as my baseline (so let's say it had 20 words). Then if I needed 200 words total I'd write ten lines, knowing full well that other lines of text would only have 10-15 words.
Cheating? Maybe. But it's a silly metric to begin with, and obviously the teacher didn't actually care about the count because I got an A in most of my essays.
Yes - US high school instruction in writing is something I have to spend weeks un-teaching in first year and majors courses.
I'm not in the US, I guess English classes are just like that around the world.
As a non-native speaker, I learned so much more by just watching YouTube in English than in middle and high school English classes combined
And having a topic sentence, and sometimes even deliberately using rhetorical devices like parallelism that a LLM detector would flag up.