When incoming first-year students take the Writing Exam each summer, they answer a series of questions about their experience with academic writing. One of the questions asks them to share any concerns they have about college-level writing, and a very, very common response is this: "I'm worried that each of my professors will be looking for different styles of writing, and I'm not sure they'll like mine."
It's a reasonable concern on many levels, and it reflects a very common sense—among students and instructors alike—that grading writing is "subjective." It doesn't need to be, though, and it shouldn't be. If you share an assignment prompt with your students at the beginning of a unit, and you discuss it together, and students are aware of how they'll be graded, and you teach them the skills they need and give them opportunities for practice and feedback, and then you give them a grade that is accompanied by comments that describe the relationship between their work and the assignment + rubric—that isn't "subjective." It's highly intersubjective, and a goal of Gen Ed Writes—including the different versions of the assignment decoder exercise—is to offer a clear framework for making the cultures of writing in Gen Ed as intersubjective as possible.
A corollary to this principle: Creative or non-traditional assignments don't reintroduce the problem of "subjective" grading into things. If anything, their differences from standard academic essays simply make us more aware that we need to step back and think about what we're teaching and how to give students feedback on it. If it's hard to figure out how to grade an assignment, it's worth spending time thinking about its design; if an assignment is well designed, it will be much easier to know how to grade it.