The demand that public school students, especially at the high school level, write under time pressure has been the subject of debate for at least the last seventy-five years. As state after state has added timed writing component to its testing apparatus in recent years, the debate has intensified. Those teachers who are alumni of the National…

Discusses the problems of readers' different responses to essay test passages and the implications for the subsequent writing assignment. Describes a model of the writing assessment episode and discusses four generalizations about writing task interpretation. (HTH)