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Brag document template

For a running record of accomplishments that feeds performance reviews, promotion packets and résumé updates. Origin: Julia Evans, "Get your work recognized: write a brag document" (2019), now common practice in engineering and product teams.

Start from this templateFree, no account needed. The blank is written with guidance in each section, ready to fill in.

Sections

  1. Goals for this period
  2. Projects with impact
  3. Collaboration & mentoring
  4. Design & documentation
  5. Company building
  6. What I learned
  7. Outside work
  8. Goals for next period

How a tough reader scores it

When you score a draft against this format, the Critic evaluates this brag document. The weights add up to 100; the fixes for the weakest criteria arrive as cards in the editor.

CriterionWeight
Projects state the writer's own part and a measured impact30
Covers the less visible work: mentoring, documentation, process20
Specific enough that a manager could cite entries in a review20
Honest about what was learned, including misses10
Goals for next period follow from the record10
Kept as a running list rather than rewritten as prose10

How it works in SecondPen.ai

Open the template and the editor writes the blank once, with a line of guidance under each heading that you delete as you fill it in. Write your abstract and the editor names the format it reads like. Ask for a document with a slash command and it offers to start from the matching format. When the draft is ready, the Critic scores it against the criteria above, the way this format's toughest reader would, and the three highest-leverage fixes become Editor cards.

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