How to Create a Writing Rubric that Works

There is no easy way to grade writing. Writing is quite subjective from writer to reader. However, pieces of good writing have commonalities. These commonalities are the best way I’ve found for grading pieces of writing. And based on my research many other educators agree. Hence, we use writing rubrics to grade writing. Last week I wrote about How to Have Meaningful Writing Conferences With Your Students and I discussed using a rubric during the conference to highlight areas of strengths and weaknesses. So, this week I want to dive deeper into how to create a writing rubric.

Some ELA curriculums come with ready-made rubrics for scoring writing. Some of them can be decent, but be sure to look them over ahead of time to make sure. They need to include a clear way of how students earn each score in each skill category of the rubric. If they don’t, you should create your own for ease of scoring.

Rubric Ratings

You want to make sure the way you score a student in writing is as objective as possible. For example if you’re grading on the score of punctuation and the ratings are 1-4, you need to know what qualities each of those ratings have. Most likely a 1 would be no punctuation, and a 4 would be 1 error or less in punctuation. But what does a 2 or 3 look like? How many errors constitute which number the student receives? The number of errors should be based on the standards for the grade level and may vary by what point in the year you are grading the writing in. Depending on your school, this would be a good discussion to have as a grade level team or during a PLC.

In LETRS, their Writing Evaluation Checklist is divided by foundational writing skills and composition of the piece. I agree with this. The foundational skills include skills such as spelling, letter formation, spacing, and more. The composition skills include topic knowledge, word choice, audience awareness, and others. The checklist rates student writing from 1-4, 1-poor, 2-basic, 3-proficient, and 4-advanced. The criteria for each of these is based off the writing assignment and are as follows: poor-not met, basic-minimally met, proficient-meets grade-level, and advanced-exceeds grade level (Moats & Tolman, 2019). If you are interested in learning more about LETRS training, check out my post on LETRS: What is LETRS? And what does it entail?

How to Write the Rubric

You can create more than one rubric. The foundational skills will remain the same for all rubrics created, but the composition part would vary based on the type of writing. Narrative writing should have different skills than informational writing. For instance, narrative writing may include having a problem and solution, whereas informational writing may include properly citing evidence.

How your rubric is written will vary by grade level with skills becoming more advanced the higher the grade level. You want the rubric to correlate with the standards of the grade you are teaching. Also, having a writing sample of what each rating looks like will be a helpful model for students as they write.

Sharing the Rubric

Once the rubric is complete, it is important to share the rubric and writing samples with your students before the assignment begins. You will want them to have a clear understanding of what you want the finished product to look like.

This is the rubric that you will have out during the writing conferences with your students. Refer to it as you point out a strength in their writing and 1-2 skills to work on. For more on this refer to last week’s post, How to Have Meaningful Writing Conference With Your Students.

Rubrics and Grading

One final note, you will want to, also, correlate your writing rubric overall ratings with a grade equivalent. You will need those grades when it comes time for report cards. When looking at your rubric, did the student score mostly proficient or basic? If they scored mostly proficient, is that score a B? Again, decide this ahead of time. You don’t want to give one student who scored mostly proficient a B and another student an A for the same thing.

Having all of this planned out ahead of time will make it easier for you to grade student writing. Furthermore, it will help explain a student grade to a parent who may challenge you. Hopefully that won’t happen, but as we all know, it is possible.

Conclusion

I hope the last three weeks have been helpful to you as I dove into the topic of writing! Please comment below what has been most helpful to you or any lingering questions you may have.