Are we at risk of ‘functional illiteracy’? An important skill is disappearing

Julka studies at the polytechnic, she is in her fifth year. She always preferred science subjects. In elementary and middle school, her mother usually wrote her essays for her. In high school, she had to do it on her own, but she was in a math class, so she had few such tasks. Besides, the Polish teacher wasn’t nitpicking like a humanities teacher. She turned a blind eye to mistakes.

During my studies, linguistic correctness became even more important. They often assigned written assignments, but they only paid attention to the content. Julka was afraid of engineering work. However, several dozen pages of text are different than short homework assignments. Rescue came around the same time when the promoter approved the topic for Julka. A free version of ChatGPT has been released.

– It’s not like the chat did all the work for me – emphasizes Julka. – I came up with a topic, the tool clarified it. I planned the content of all chapters. I read many source texts and wrote down everything that was included in the target text. While working on engineering, I learned the same things that I would have learned if I hadn’t had the help of a chat. He just put the whole thing into correct sentences.

Julka says that she doesn’t know anyone in her field who wouldn’t use this tool while writing an engineering thesis. They also use the cottage for other college projects. Some people even use it when writing simple e-mails to lecturers.

It’s similar at work. Julka is an intern in the finance department of a large corporation. He mainly deals with sorting invoices and entering data into Excel tables. From time to time, he has to send an e-mail to other employees and ask them about specific expenses. For this purpose, it uses templates generated by the chat.

– Other interns in my department do exactly the same. This is easier, faster and we can be sure that there will be no errors in the text – explains Julka.

She says that the chat also helped her get an internship.

– Before the job interview, I wrote down a few questions frequently asked in such situations. Chat generated replies. I had them displayed on my screen all the time. The first questions were very general. That’s when I took Chat’s advice. These were some platitudes about wanting to develop or gain experience. But nicely put, organized. I have a problem with pouring water myself, my own words would probably be very chaotic – says the student.

Non-writing humanists

It’s not a bad thing if young people who graduate from polybudum and other “strict” universities give up writing. They will probably never work with text professionally. They would keep it to a minimum anyway. What’s worse is that students of humanities also willingly use chat’s help.

Ola is in her first year of journalism. In high school she went to humanities. She wrote essays regularly, earning mostly A’s and C’s. During her studies, she did not know any reality other than the one with chat. She went into journalism because she wanted to appear in front of the camera or on the radio. He treats writing as a necessary evil.