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Have you not noticed that when you write something down with the purpose of summarising it in a structured way you tend to understand it better?

There's no market for kids essays, we never made them write these things with the purpose of being useful output. The market for essays for grown ups is also very small, making kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering the case of them becoming journalists or something. It's just that makes them learn to think and structure their thought process. That's why people take notes and write down things even if its not going to be graded or read by anyone else.



Agreed. Yet many students, parents, and even teachers lost sight of this purpose.


School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing.[0] It sounds like a more didactic use of these kids time would be arguing on forums about their favorite anime.

[0]: http://paulgraham.com/essay.html


> School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing.

Yes. And one interesting thing about ChatGPT is that, when asked to write an essay about a topic, it defaults to the standard introduction-body-conclusion organization of a school essay assignment [1]. Since its training data must have included texts organized in many other ways, I wonder if it was tweaked to default to the school-essay format.

[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html


Long form essay isn't great for that, especially as taught in school.

Writing an idea down as concisely as possible is important, the rest is just embellishment and is easily handled by AI.




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