How to make taste teachable, transferable, and consistent

Module 3 · Lesson 5 of 5

Taste is personal and hard to transfer. You develop it through exposure and experience specific to your history and context. But not all of taste is personal. There's a layer of evaluation that can be articulated, written down, and consistently applied by others. That layer is the rubric—a set of explicit criteria that distinguish excellent work from adequate work in your domain.

A rubric captures the articulable part of taste. It's the part of your judgment that you can make visible enough that someone else could apply it and reach similar conclusions. It's not the whole story of what makes work good—that includes intuition and context and judgment that's hard to write down. But a well-built rubric captures enough that it becomes genuinely useful. It makes evaluation consistent. It makes standards teachable. It makes feedback specific instead of vague.