Historical Fiction Writing Project
Historical Fiction Rubric

Ideas for writing goal focus:

Confidence and Independence: Confer with yourself. Read your writing as an other and decide for yourself what works and what needs more work. Pull through difficulty with more independence, push for closure, finish a draft, then seek others' responses.

Descriptive writing: Tell more in your writing. Provide the details that will help readers see, hear, and feel your vision.

Quantity: Experiment with alternatives--several different leads, passages, conclusions, titles--then choose and work with the best.

Completion: Finish your story by the given deadline. Adhere to all checkpoints.

Embedding context: Weave in the who-what-when-where-and-why amid the dialogue and action

Conciseness: Work on succinctness, or at least deletion after the fact. What don't you need? What doesn't add to the character, plot, tone, theme, idea?

Proofreading: Proofread for sense: for missing words and missing word endings (e.g., s and ed)

Conventions: Punctuate, capitalize, and paragraph correctly, right from the start.

Spelling: Self-edit for spelling by circling, then looking up, every word you're not absolutely sure of. Keep a record of hard-to-spell words.

Homonyms: Get homonyms (your/you're, their/they're/there, and its/it's) under control.

New marks: Try new marks to give your writing greater voice, eg., : ; and --.

Commas: Learn the basic conventions governing commas; delete unnecessary commas. Watch for comma splices.

Verb tense: Recognize and keep a consistent verb tense.

Elimination of qualifiers: Eliminate the qualifiers and diminishes that can clutter writing: so, really, very, sort of, kind of