The importance of dear, legible handwriting in academic achievement should not be underestimated. A pressing need for a reliable instrument to measure rate and quality of penmanship led to the construction of the Children's Handwriting Evaluation Scale (CHES). The scoring standards for the CHES are based on the writing of 1,365 children in grades 3-8. Rate scales make it easy to pinpoint children whose copying rate requires remediation. Quality standards, carefully defined and clearly illustrated, indicate areas where help is needed. The reliability of objective scoring is based on a comparison of judgments of four independent raters which shows significant intraclass correlation. The CHES also provides a projective scoring key based on accepted graphological interpretations.