The head of NewView Options, Bill Drew, makes a rather disturbing claim. “American students aren’t doing well on national writing tests.” He bases his assertion on recent studies that indicate writing skills are in decline in US schools. Drew goes on to say, “That’s why I created NewView Options, wrote The Secret DNA of Writing Essays-And Everything Else, engineered the NewView Essay Writing Services computer program, and created a website to bring it all together.”American students are not writing well? “That’s right,” Drew said. “In a 2003 press release the National Commission on Writing (NCW) called for the immediate launch of a 5-year Writing Challenge to the Nation. The NCW was greatly concerned because the 2002 national results for high school writing tests were at the same low level as the same tests in 1998. Only 1 out of 5 high school seniors could write well enough to do acceptable writing (Proficient) in college. So the NCW called on all levels of government to provide more money, more computer equipment, more teachers, more training of teachers, and more time spent on writing by students in all classes.”Did student writing improve after five years? “Not in the Proficient level, which is what the NCW is rightly concerned about,” said Drew. “The headline of an April 2008 press release ( http://bit.ly/2008ReportCard ) said, and I quote, ‘Scores increase in 2007 for both eighth- and twelfth-graders nationally.’ That’s misleading because, when you get down into the facts of the report, it says the increases were at the Basic level, not the Proficient level. The Basic level allows serious flaws in writing, and is just above being illiterate. The Proficient level is what counts, and that was at the center of concern for the NCW in its 2003 press release.