[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).