[ksdale]

When I was a child learning to write, so many of these rules bothered me so much. I'd get notes like that on my papers, and I'd think, "Yeah, but my way sounds better..." But so often that point is met with a blank stare, as if how the writing comes out doesn't matter at all compared to whether the "rules" were followed.

I'm sure a lot of it was me just being a headstrong young person, but I also know that according to grades, I was much better at writing than most of my peers, and I also continually felt like I was writing worse than I could have been, in order to satisfy teachers.

[aidenn0]

The goal of all writing classes is to make the grader happy. For a good writing class, making the grader happy and writing well are in close alignment. For the overwhelming majority of writing classes the two are mostly orthogonal.

The above paragraph is obvious to many, but wasn't to me as I'm not great at picking up on social cues. What finally made it click was comparing grades with a friend for an assignment that had a rubric. Each category could get a "+" a "" or a "-" (in descending order of "goodness"). My friends marks were strictly worse than mine, he got a B, I got a D.

Usually it's less blatant than this, but this particular teacher had it in for me (though not without cause).