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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.
by flexagoon 6mo ago
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.
- abustamam 6mo agoThe 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.
- red_admiral 6mo agoAnd having a topic sentence, and sometimes even deliberately using rhetorical devices like parallelism that a LLM detector would flag up.
- mold_aid 6mo agoYes - US high school instruction in writing is something I have to spend weeks un-teaching in first year and majors courses.
- flexagoon 6mo agoI'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