Grade any writing assignment with criteria for ideas, organization, voice, and conventions, then export the rubric to PDF.
A general writing rubric has to do something specialized rubrics dodge: grade a narrative, an explanatory paragraph, and a persuasive letter with the same four rows and still feel fair to each. This one manages it by scoring the traits that cut across every genre — Ideas & Content, Organization, Voice & Word Choice, and Conventions — rather than features tied to one form. It is the rubric to reach for when you want a single consistent yardstick across a whole term of writing.
Every piece of writing, whatever its purpose, has something to say (Ideas), an order it says it in (Organization), a way it sounds (Voice & Word Choice), and a surface of spelling and grammar (Conventions). Because those traits are genre-independent, this rubric lets you track a student’s growth as a writer from September to June, even as the assignments change shape. That continuity is the whole point — a portfolio graded on shifting criteria tells you nothing about progress; the same four traits, applied repeatedly, tell you a great deal.
Ideas & Content is the message and its development — is there a clear main idea, and is it supported with specifics rather than generalities? Organization is structure and flow: a beginning that orients, a logical middle, an ending that lands. Voice & Word Choiceis the trait teachers most often under-grade — it is the sense that a real person with a purpose wrote this, expressed through deliberate, precise words rather than the first ones to hand. Conventionscovers the editing surface and is kept separate so that a strong young voice with shaky spelling is not buried under red ink.
This rubric shines on drafts. Score a first draft, hand back the marked grid, and a student can see that their ideas are landing but their organization is drifting — then revise with that exact target in mind. Used that way, the rubric is not a verdict but a map. It works summatively too, but if you only ever bring it out for final grades, you are wasting its most valuable feature: it tells writers what to fix while they can still fix it.
Conventions is the easiest trait to grade and the easiest to over-grade. Because errors are countable, they feel objective, and a paper bleeding red ink can drag a strong writer down a whole level on every row if you let it. Score Conventions against what you have actually taught this year, not an ideal of flawless prose, and keep it the single unweighted row it is — the surface of writing, not its substance.
If your school already uses a named traits framework, relabel these rows to match it, or split Voice and Word Choice into two if you teach them separately. Deciding how many columns to run is its own small decision with real consequences for reliability — our guide on how many performance levels a rubric should have walks through the trade-offs. And if you are weighing this general rubric against a holistic or single-point approach for a particular assignment, see analytic vs. holistic vs. single-point rubrics before you commit. Adjust any wording in the builder above to fit the genre in front of you.