[slopinthebag]

> 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!)

[flexagoon]

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]

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.

[mold_aid]

Yes - US high school instruction in writing is something I have to spend weeks un-teaching in first year and majors courses.

[flexagoon]

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

[red_admiral]

And having a topic sentence, and sometimes even deliberately using rhetorical devices like parallelism that a LLM detector would flag up.