The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive summary of current information on describing writing and measuring growth in writing, intended to help teachers decide which aspects of the process and the product to examine, how to determine a writer's specific instructional needs, how to measure growth in writing ability, and how to involve students in the evaluation of writing. Separate articles discuss the following topics: various approaches to holistic evaluation, with particular attention to analytic scales; a new holistic scoring procedure, Primary Trait Scoring, developed for use in a nation-wide assessment of writing performance; ways in which the computer can be used to characterize maturity of word choice in students' papers; new and unpublished research that affirms earlier findings by Kellogg Hunt and Francis Christensen about the development of syntactic fluency in school-age writers; a procedure for identifying the basic intellectual strategies writers use in formulating and presenting their ideas and feelings; and three ways to involve students in evaluation--individualized goal setting, self-evaluation, and peer evaluation. (GW)