The workshop will explore the features of effective writing and how they are operationalised within communicative language teaching and current theories of language competence and language assessment. It will open with the linguistic and pragmatic features of effective writing, introducing the Cambridge Assessment writing construct. It will then look at issues around the assessment of writing, the concept of writing scales and how writing scales work in Cambridge exams, specifically looking at subcategories, band descriptors and how they integrate across levels and in different exams.