ABSTRACT
When writers write to learn something new rather than to communicate with someone else, they pick and choose among the activities of the writing process. Sometimes they simply gather information and organize it (prewriting). Sometimes they put what they are learning into tentative sentences and paragraphs (drafting). Sometimes they choose readers and begin to communicate what they know to someone else. Just as teaching helps us learn, so writing to someone else helps us learn in more depth. When I wrote my first book, Evaluating Children’s Writing (1994a), I began writing to elementary teachers what I knew about evaluation because I believed that grades were a necessary evil with which we all had to cope. By the time I had completed the book, I had learned how to use evaluation as teaching tool that could actually help us teach better. Writing what I knew taught me more than I knew when I started!
