So yeah, it can change the character of your writing, even if it's just relatively subtle nudges here or there.
edit: we suggested that he disable that feature to help him learn to write independently, and he happily agreed.
So yeah, it can change the character of your writing, even if it's just relatively subtle nudges here or there.
edit: we suggested that he disable that feature to help him learn to write independently, and he happily agreed.
1. A system that suggests words, the child learns the word, determines whether it matches their intent, and proceeds if they like the result.
2. A system that suggests words, and the child almost-blindly accepts them to get the task over with ASAP.
The end-results may look the same for any single short document, but in the long run... Well, I fear #2 is going to be way more common.
The phenomenon was observed in religious philosophy over a millennium ago (https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html).
Now that it is, I just turn tab completion off totally when I write code by hand. It's almost never right.
I have mixed feeling about it. On the one hand, you're right: carefully considering suggestions can be a learning opportunity. On the other hand, approval is easier than generation, and I suspect that without flexing the "come up with it from scratch" muscle frequently, that his mind won't develop as much.
A "click to see more about why this answer fits" crossword, on the other hand...
Shoal, Hasty, Lobby, Vogue, Gunky,
Sheep, Theft, Linen, Slime, Fluke,
Hydra, Dizzy, Lance, Shred, Buyer,
Attic, Guava, Awake, Stank, Hoist,
Mogul, Squad, Roost, Skull, Bloom,
Mooch, Surge, Vegan, Scene, Cello,
None of those stand out as "WTF does that even mean", but maybe I'm the weird one if we adjust for age-demographics or book-reading.If I had to guess at a riskier 20%... Guava, a fruit some people may not have had; Gunky because it's slang; Mogul, Vogue, and Mooch were borrowed from other languages; Cello is something people may have heard more than read; Hoist.
That's a good point and could very well be true. I just know I've played plenty of games where I was mad that they didn't show the meaning. So let's say its 5% for native speakers, and up to 20% for non-native speakers - that's still a golden opportunity to expand vocabularies. And honestly it can't be a lot of work to add a couple lines of static text. At worst it would be ignored, and at most, help people learn more interesting words.
As an adult, I do too. As a middle schooler, we absolutely used word processors’ thesaurus features to add big words to our essays because the teachers liked them.
Anyway before that she HATED the thesaurus. And she could tell when students were using it to make their writing more fancy pants.
I had two teachers who called us out on this, and actually coached us on our writing, and I remember them fondly. (They were also fans of in-class essaying.)
The others wanted to count big words.
A certain amount of friction is necessary, at least if the goal is to help the person learn or make something original.