A history of the Test of Written English (TWE), a section of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), describes its inception and development process. The new test is a thirty-minute essay test providing a measure of a non-native English-speaker's ability to perform academic writing tasks similar to those required of international students in North American universities. The article describes the impetus for and early concerns about a standardized writing test, preliminary surveys of administrators and teachers of English as a second language, an investigation of the extent to which the existing test assessed academic writing skills, research on academic writing skill needs, a subsequent survey concerning support in the profession for a new writing test, and the development of the instrument itself. The instrument's development includes a continuing process for drafting, selecting, and polishing essay topics, a pretest, determination of the procedures for reading and scoring essays (including reader selection and training, and scoring reliability), solving technological problems associated with changing the overall test format, incorporating TWE scores into the TOEFL scale, and giving the test a name. (MSE)