From mechanical correctness to cohesion of thought
Although rubrics are traditionally tools used by teachers — and so perfectly aligned as tools for editors and reviewers — writers can benefit from studying them as well. Becoming familiar with the attributes of a particular aspect of writing as it scans out across a scale of mastery makes for another means of studying that aspect.
Studying writing is what you engage in when you’re still in pursuit of such mastery. Or when you need a little touch-up.
The following rubric is one I developed to organize thinking around writing shaped as essay, article, or blog post. So, nonfiction. Perhaps expository, perhaps persuasive, perhaps narrative. I focused on a few fundamental aspects underlying all such writing, not anything specific to the techniques of exposition, rhetoric and argumentation, or narrative.
This is a rudimentary and baseline rubric.
Mechanical correctness
Simple mechanical correctness is the most basic attribute of good writing. These are the aspects a reader is most likely to notice when not tidy and taken care of: caps, spelling, grammar, word choice, usage, punctuation. All of these aspects should fade into the background, rather than calling attention to themselves.
A professional writer manages these aspects as a matter of course. Nothing should be out of place. When you are working with novice writers or with subject matter experts, you might find one or more of these basic attributes to be problematic.
Sentence structure and control
Following the basic and surface-level mechanics, the next aspect of writing you might consider are the sentences themselves. Is the construction of individual sentences sound? How well does each sentence work to convey the thought intended? This is not yet how sentences work with one another, but rather how each one works individually. (In a piece that works well, those two aspects become fluid and intermingled. But it can be useful, in terms of evaluating and troubleshooting, to consider the two aspects separately.)
Cohesion
To form a piece of connected thought, the sentences must work together in concert. The next measure to consider is how well that thought is constructed, sentence by sentence. That is, how fluidly or not does the thought flow from one syntactic unit of thought to the next?
Coherence
Finally, how well is the piece overall structured and organized? From the smallest units of structure to the largest. Does the text work with that structure? Is the structure clear? Is it standard? Does it map well to the context?
