There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.

The writer argues that these are signs of learning a language in a formal, ossified, officially-good way rather than as the living organism of a spoken tongue. But he could equally note that his Kenyan essay test involves people with limited knowledge of English under high pressure to sound smart, being graded by other people with limited knowledge of English. This is the same levels-of-abstraction bottleneck that produces AI writing, and with the same result.