Honestly, essay writing was a useful skill from school and I kinda wish I had practiced more as a kid.
@mauve I did back then, but in the wrong language. My native language that is pretty much useless in the world where I need to communicate these days :(
@ninabreznik does the structuring of ideas partof essay writing still apply? I know that France essay writing is pretty different from north american styles which some folks I knew had trouble with
@mauve Ha, I think it does. I mean, it is kind of logic and argumentation but maybe in my language it wasn't so strict or so well defined as what we learned in English. In my language we mainly wrote essays about literature, not other topics so it definitely feels different...
@ninabreznik for what it's worth I obly really did essays on literature in my English classes too. i think some of it helped for my technical writing though.
@mauve But funnily I ditched it all and went coding. Yay! But I am kind of still trying to use the basic techniques. Now it's the language that is the blocker. But (pssst) we have chat gpt that helps me nowadays and fixes my grammar. I just give him a concept and then go paragraph by paragraph until I get something that makes sense....
@mauve I was trying to remember how we did it in slovenian language. And the teacher literally gave us 3 questions and said, now write the whole essay trying to answer those 3 questions. Nothing about how you should do it, we just went with the flow.
Which is pretty ridiculous when i think about it now. In English classes they gave us this basic structure I mentioned above and I still use this in some way. But it's also true I studied literature and linguistics and later communication studies.