A rubric encapsulates degrees of mastery
When a piece of writing works well, everything coalesces into one beautiful whole. Conversely, when the writing falls short, it can sometimes be difficult to sort out from the tangle where it’s working and where not.
This holds particularly true for those new to rating and evaluating.
Enter: the rubric
A rubric — that is, a scoring tool that lists the qualities of a given aspect of writing across graduated levels of mastery — is tool commonly used by teachers to evaluate the work of students.
It is equally well suited to assist editors, writers, and reviewers.
For editors or reviewers
A rubric can help editors organize their thinking with respect to a given set of attributes of a piece of writing, and how well a writer has mastered each. This, in turn, can help an editor assess how the writer might improve, guiding comments and suggestions.
It also gives an editor the means, when called upon to do so, for evaluating individual pieces of writing along a set of defined parameters. This is often a feature, behind the scenes, of work-for-hire writing, and it comes into play also in writing contests and similar contexts.
Close evaluation of a piece of work also comes into play sometimes with reviewing, whether the reviewer comes from an editing or a writing background. Reviewing often also involves reader response, but looking beneath that response to core reasons helps give a review more substance.
As with an editing checklist, a rubric for writing quality is another tool to help editors (or reviewers) stay sharp and consistent across the different pieces they’ll be reviewing. And as with an editing checklist, the rubric must be matched to the writing context. What might work well as a measure for writing of one type might not work at all for writing of another. What can work well for editors can in this respect work for reviewers as well.
For writers
Writers should never be thinking of rubrics or checklists, when in the process of pulling together their work. At that point, all those precepts that such aids are built on should already be part of your toolkit. Or on the way to being so. When you’re in the heat of creating, you’ll be marshaling all your understanding, all your skills, and bringing it to bear on the work as you shape and reshape it.
It’s when your work as a writer is in review — whether by you, as you cast your eye over what you wrote the day, the week, the month before, or by an editor or reviewer — that you’ll find out how well what’s on the page has aligned with your vision. How well you’re doing with respect to where you want to be.
The writing itself is the practice. The review is a checkpoint. That’s when class is in session, and you regroup. Then it’s back into the fray again, armed with some fresh insights and possible strategies.
Working this way amounts to deliberate practice, and it’s how we improve our skills in any arena.
Constructing a rubric
It’s not difficult to construct such a rubric.
A good starting point is to think in terms of a few key features of successful writing for your writing context and genre. If you then formulate for yourself what those key features look like across a five-point scale, with the midpoint of 3 being “good” or “average,” you’ll have constructed a five-point rubric for use as a handy measure anytime you’re called upon to evaluate a piece of writing. Whether that’s your own or someone else’s.
As a guide, you can look at other rubrics out there, though many of those posted online work for writing more novice than you are likely to be engaged in. Here’s a simple rubric I put together to evaluate short articles and essays submitted by freelance writers. Because these pieces were of various types, I focused on a few fundamental aspects of writing common to all nonfiction work, not the more particular aspects one might also look at. The use of metaphor or analogy to clarify, for example, the use of evidence and strong arguments, the use of narrative technique.
Five-point rubrics are sufficient for most needs, but some contexts call for 10-point versions. Here’s a 10-point rubric for reviewing and scoring the traditional story values in short-form fiction. It focuses on key aspects of such story values, and in a way that’s not likely to mirror exactly what happens in any given story — as individual stories typically have varying strengths and weaknesses — yet working through it can still be a useful exercise.
Beyond their use as a tool, the process of constructing rubrics to reflect various qualities of writing is good practice for editors, reviewers, and writers alike. The exercise of thinking through what makes for poor, average, and excellent mastery of a particular quality — and the gradations in between — is a form of study, a form itself of deliberate practice.
Just keep in mind that it’s only one technique for getting inside a piece of writing, indeed the qualities of beautiful writing overall. The mechanics of it are a way of becoming deeply familiar with the gradations of mastery. But sometimes, when all the elements of art and craft and insight come together just so, there’s also that spark of something fine and true, transcendent, almost indefinable — pure bliss on the page.