Thanks for reading, Mark!

Admittedly, I’ve conflated a couple senses of the word subjective here — subjectivism and subjectivity — and you’re right to push back. The terms are related but are not the same thing. At that point in the article, I wasn’t arguing that writing instruction should be subjective in the sense of being a mere matter of opinion (the first sense), but rather that writing, by its very nature, is going to recognize the writer as subject, as having agency (the second sense).

I’d argue that teachers of all disciplines need to adopt this attitude of intersubjectivity, but I’m going to limit myself to writing, which is fundamentally self-expressive. Of course, I think that the teacher brings certain objective standards to the table, empowering students to assess themselves against those standards.

But I am arguing that we do great violence to writing (and other disciplines, cf. “A Mathematicians Lament”) when that objectivity becomes the gold standard of all assessment.