In fall 2010, the University of Massachusetts Amherst instituted a new upper-division General Education requirement, the Integrative Experience (IE), designed to help students integrate the various components of their undergraduate experience and reflect upon their learning and development as a result of those experiences, both key dimensions of High Impact Practices. In this article, we describe how writing played an important role in both 1) shaping formative assessment that informed program implementation and 2) facilitating integrative and reflective thinking through IE assignments. More generally, our assessment findings show the strong link of writing to distinguishing features of High Impact Practices and argue for broad, collaborative assessments that uncover such inter-connections. Our experience also underscores the wisdom of writing faculty being actively involved in general education program development and assessment, and taking the broad view of the role writing can play for learning.