For many years, writing skills were treated as the ugly stepsister of reading skills. Tests of “verbal aptitude” and “verbal ability” comprised assessments of vocabulary, reading comprehension, and verbal reasoning. Writing was nowhere to be found. Even achievement tests of “English composition” created by the College Board often had no actual writing whatsoever. Although Louis Thurstone distinguished between verbal comprehension and verbal fluency in his early theory of primary mental abilities, the former has been widely measured, the latter only rarely. And when the latter was measured, it was typically by tests requiring writing at a basic level, such as writing down as many words beginning with a certain letter as an examinee could think of in a specific time period.

In 2008, as I am writing this foreword, the situation in practice has improved slightly. For example, the SAT Reasoning Test (as it is now called, after many name changes) includes a writing section, although it is so formulaic in its conceptualization and scoring that it is not clear how much it measures writing in a more creative sense. And educators are increasingly recognizing the importance of writing for success not only in school but also in later life. Writing has always been much harder to study and measure than reading, because it does not lend itself nicely to multiple-choice or other objective forms of scoring. But psychologists and others are rising to the challenge, as shown by the present book.