At my last job, I was constantly being graded,
and I was not doing well enough.
I was running averages of 92 percent.
and I needed to maintain 94s.

I had supportive leaders
who were trying to help me get to the issue
with why my scores weren’t higher
and I kept trying to approach the issue
by looking into where I was getting marked down
and what kind of problems I was having.

One consistent issue was that
the house style required paraphrasing
– insisted upon it, not just when it seemed organic.
I find reiteration too often reads as condescending
and robotic in practice,
and hate to see it used in correspondence,
so it took me a while to get used to the practice.

The bigger, more frustrating thing
took me much longer to solve.
That was so obvious,
it pisses me off that I didn’t fix it sooner:
I didn’t check my work.
If I just read over what I was sending out
I would have gotten better scores almost immediately.
Idiot!
I’m a writer. I’m an editor.
Why wouldn’t review occur to me sooner?

I was able to turn the numbers around
but it didn’t save the job.
Someday, I’ll find something else.
I’ll take the lessons on with me there.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll check my work
at the new job.