Writing assessment refers to an area of study that contains theories and practices that guide the evaluation of a writer's performance or potential through a writing task. Writing assessment can be considered a combination of scholarship from composition studies and measurement theory within educational assessment. Writing assessment can also refer to the technologies and practices used to evaluate student writing and learning. An important consequence of writing assessment is that the type and manner of assessment may impact writing instruction, with consequences for the character and quality of that instruction.

Writing assessment began as a classroom practice during the first two decades of the 20th century, though high-stakes and standardized tests also emerged during this time. During the 1930s, College Board shifted from using direct writing assessment to indirect assessment because these tests were more cost-effective and were believed to be more reliable. Starting in the 1950s, more students from diverse backgrounds were attending colleges and universities, so administrators made use of standardized testing to decide where these students should be placed, what and how to teach them, and how to measure that they learned what they needed to learn. The large-scale statewide writing assessments that developed during this time combined direct writing assessment with multiple-choice items, a practice that remains dominant today across U.S. large scale testing programs, such as the SAT and GRE. These assessments usually take place outside of the classroom, at the state and national level. However, as more and more students were placed into courses based on their standardized testing scores, writing teachers began to notice a conflict between what students were being tested on—grammar, usage, and vocabulary—and what the teachers were actually teaching—writing process and revision. Scholars and experts who measured education valued different kinds of standards to assess, while writing studies scholars wanted the focus of writing assessments to be on students learning. Because of this divide, educators began pushing for writing assessments that were designed and implemented at the local, programmatic and classroom levels. As writing teachers began designing local assessments, the methods of assessment began to diversify, resulting in timed essay tests, locally designed rubrics, and portfolios. In addition to the classroom and programmatic levels, writing assessment is also hugely influential on writing centers for writing center assessment, and similar academic support centers.

Because writing assessment is used in multiple contexts, the history of writing assessment can be traced through examining specific concepts and situations that prompt major shifts in theories and practices. Writing assessment scholars do not always agree about the origin of writing assessment.

The history of writing assessment has been described as consisting of three major shifts in methods used in assessing writing. The first wave of writing assessment (1950-1970) sought objective tests with indirect measures of assessment. The second wave (1970-1986) focused on holistically scored tests where the students' actual writing began to be assessed. And the third wave (since 1986) shifted toward assessing a collection of student work (i.e. portfolio assessment) and programmatic assessment.

The 1961 publication of Factors in Judgments of Writing Ability in 1961 by Diederich, French, and Carlton has also been characterized as marking the birth of modern writing assessment. Diederich et al. based much of their book on research conducted through the Educational Testing Service (ETS) for the previous decade. This book is an attempt to standardize the assessment of writing and is responsible for establishing a base of research in writing assessment.

The concepts of validity and reliability have been offered as a kind of heuristic for understanding shifts in priorities in writing assessment as well interpreting what is understood as best practices in writing assessment.

In the first wave of writing assessment, the emphasis is on reliability: reliability confronts questions over the consistency of a test. In this wave, the central concern was to assess writing with the best predictability with the least amount of cost and work. Some scholars like David Slomp held concern over the definition of reliability and how interrater reliability could affect how writing was assessed. He argued that often times there was not enough context based on the learner to appropriately judge their writing.

Then there was a shift toward the second wave marked a move toward considering principles of validity. Validity confronts questions over a test's appropriateness and effectiveness for the given purpose. Methods in this wave were more concerned with a test's construct validity: whether the material prompted from a test is an appropriate measure of what the test purports to measure. Teachers began to see an incongruence between the material being prompted to measure writing and the material teachers were asking students to write. Holistic scoring, championed by writing scholar Edward M. White, emerged in this wave. It is one method of assessment where students' writing is prompted to measure their writing ability.