This book attempts to build a new assessment, demystifying traditional notions of assessment as a privatized technical apparatus and focusing on the role of writing teachers and administrators and their expertise. This new assessment not only links pedagogy with evaluation practices, it makes the ability to assess one's own writing a primary goal of the teaching and learning of writing. Understanding the power of well-designed, site-based and locally controlled writing assessment procedures guards against the use of unnecessary, standardized or large-scale current traditional assessments. Brian Huot's well-reasoned, provocative discourse on primary conceptions in the field will be of significant value to scholars in writing and writing assessment, to writing program administrators, to readers in educational assessment, and to graduate students in rhetoric and composition.