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I posit that of the various uses of student writing, the most important isn't communication or even assessment, but synthesis. Writing forces you to grapple wit
by thadt 1y ago
I posit that of the various uses of student writing, the most important isn't communication or even assessment, but synthesis. Writing forces you to grapple with a subject in a way that clarifies your thinking. It's easy to think you understand something until you have to explain or apply it.
Skipping that entirely, or using a LLM to do most of it for you, skips something rather important.
- schmichael 1y ago> Writing forces you I agree entirely with you except for the word "forces." Writing can cause synthesis. It should. It should be graded to encourage that... ...but all of that is a whole lot of work for everyone involved: student and teacher alike. And that kind of synthesis is in no way unique to essays! All of the other mediums I mention can make synthesis more readily apparent then paragraphs of (often very low quality) prose. A clever meme lampooning the "mere merchant" status of the Medici family could demonstrate a level of understanding that would take paragraphs of prose to convey.