Real writing doesn’t follow a genre timetable

September is recount. October is report. Then we move on to procedure and persuasion.

It’s a familiar way to organise writing in Irish primary schools. It gives us a plan and makes it easy to see what we’ve covered. At the Literacy Association of Ireland conference, I asked what children might learn about writing from encountering it this way, year after year. I've been asked to share a little more for those who couldn't attend, so I've channeled it into writing this post.

When we start with a genre, we’ve already made one of the writer’s decisions. I’d start a step earlier. What is worth writing about, and what could the writing do? It might help someone understand a problem, bring a memory to life or help the writer work out what they think. Once there’s a reason to write, we can ask what children need to learn to do it well.

How did we get so attached to genre?

In Ireland, I think we’ve become so attached to organising writing by genre that we can mistake covering the genres for teaching writing. First Steps is a familiar reference point for many. It began in Western Australia as a whole-school initiative with particular attention to children at risk of literacy difficulties. Its writing materials address how writers compose, the conventions they draw on and the contexts in which they write. If the part that stays most visible in our planning is a sequence of genres and their features, we’ve kept the part that tells us what to cover. We still need to decide what children will use that knowledge to do.

Anne Thwaite’s work offers a parallel. In Learning How to Mean, Halliday (1975) described what very young children first learn to do with language and traced how they come to express several meanings at once. The early functions came from observing children using language in everyday life. They were part of an account of how language develops.

In the 2006 First Steps Speaking and Listening Resource Book, those early functions appear as a list in a discussion of primary-school children’s talk. Thwaite (2019) argues that this can give a misleading impression of Halliday’s theory. The list survives while the account of how children’s language develops recedes.

That example comes from oral language, but it makes me wonder what happens when we turn knowledge about writing into a list of genres to cover. A single text can explain what happened, make a case for change and invite someone to act. When we teach each genre in a separate block, where do children get to see how those purposes work together? And when do they get to decide which forms will help them make the meaning they want?

A single text can do several things

Imagine a piece for the school newsletter asking families to help restore the school garden. It might recount what happened over the winter, explain why the beds need repair and make a case for coming along on Saturday. It might include a short set of instructions for anyone bringing tools.

The purpose gives the piece its shape. Families need to understand what happened before they can see why their help matters. They also need to be able to find the time and place quickly. Those needs give us a reason to teach children how to explain the damage, make a convincing case and organise practical information. The children still have decisions to make about what this particular text needs.

When a form starts to limit the writing

Think about the acrostic. A child writes AUTUMN down the side of the page. The pattern might prompt an image they would never otherwise have thought of. But suppose they’re trying to capture the first cold morning of autumn and have written a line that does exactly that. It begins with the wrong letter. If completing the acrostic is the measure of success, they have a good reason to leave out a line that might make the poem stronger.

That’s where I’d ask whether we’re setting the bar high enough? We can tell at a glance whether the pattern is complete. To talk about the quality of the poem, we have to read it. Which line makes us feel the cold? What does the sound of the words add? A frame, form or scaffold should help children make choices like these. If it routinely makes those choices for them, it limits what their writing can become.

That’s the risk that can be described as compliant writing (Fiorentini, 2026; Gallagher, 2019). Compliant writing can be used to describe what can happen when meeting the requirements of a task becomes the child’s main reason for writing. This connects with what Lambirth (2016) calls a compliance discourse. His research invites us to ask what children learn to value when correctness and teacher approval dominate their accounts of successful writing. Children can become very good at working out what a task requires and delivering it. Lambirth’s (2016) research on children’s views of school writing invites us to ask what their experience has taught them to value, especially when correctness and adult approval dominate their accounts of success.

That’s why the templates and scaffolds we use for genre writing deserve a closer look. Take a procedural scaffold with six numbered boxes. Does it help the child put the steps in an order someone else can follow? Or does it give them six boxes to fill, even if four steps would be clearer? When we look at a scaffold, I’d ask what it helps the child think through and which decisions it makes for them. That distinction helps us decide when to offer it, when to adapt it and when to set it aside.

Where I’d start the planning conversation

Sometimes a reason to write comes from something children have experienced or want to change. Sometimes it grows out of a book. A story might leave children wanting to give a character a voice, or a poem might make them want to capture a place they know. Once they have something they want to say, we can look together at how other writers have done something similar.

What a mentor text helps us see

In The Writing Thief, Ruth Culham (2014) encourages us to read with a writer’s eye. A mentor text is a piece of writing we return to with children to see how a writer does something they might want to try themselves. It could be a whole picturebook, a poem or a single paragraph. We might notice how a writer makes a character’s voice distinctive, then ask what that choice helps the reader understand or feel. From there, children can decide what they might borrow or adapt for the text they’re writing and the reader they have in mind.

In The Day the Crayons Quit, all the crayons write to Duncan, but each has a different grievance. Read two letters side by side. What does each crayon want Duncan to understand or do? Which words help it make its case? The letters share a form, but they sound different because each crayon has its own perspective and wants something different from its reader.

If children write back as Duncan, they already know something about the reader they’re writing for. Would this crayon be satisfied with an apology? Would it want to know what Duncan will do differently? Thinking about what the crayon needs to hear gives children a reason to add a detail, change the tone or revise a sentence.

That’s one way reading and writing can be drawn together. As readers, children notice what another writer’s choices do. As writers, they make choices of their own with a reader in mind.

At the next school planning meeting, I’d put a piece of children’s writing on the table alongside the genre timetable. What was this child trying to do? Where can we see it working in the text? What could we teach that would help them do it better? That conversation can tell us more about what to teach next than the name of the genre we’re due to cover.

Purpose and meaning should lead our planning. A recount scaffold can help a child put events in order. But if the child wants to show why one moment mattered, giving every event equal space can bury the very thing they want the reader to notice. They might need to skip the journey and spend a whole paragraph on what happened when they arrived.

That’s a decision worth teaching a child to make. The quality of the text matters more than how closely it follows the scaffold. We can teach the conventions of a genre explicitly and give children room to use them in ways that serve what they want to say.

Beyond the classroom, writers have to work out what a reader needs and decide how best to say it. If the scaffold keeps making those decisions for children, what kinds of writing are we preparing them to do when it’s gone?

If this made you think about how writing is planned in your school, share it with a colleague who might enjoy the conversation.

Adapted from my Literacy Association of Ireland conference paper, Fiorentini, C.M. (November, 2026). From Tasks to Texts: Teaching Writing with Purpose.

References

Culham, R. (2014). The writing thief: Using mentor texts to teach the craft of writing. International Reading Association.

Daywalt, D. (2013). The day the crayons quit (O. Jeffers, Illus.). Philomel Books.

Department of Education, Western Australia. (n.d.). First Steps literacy.

Education Department of Western Australia. (1995). Student achievement: A study of the effects of First Steps teaching on student achievement.

Gallagher, K. (2019). Foreword. In L. Prather, Story matters: Teaching teens to use the tools of narrative to argue and inform (pp. xi–xiv). Heinemann.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language. Edward Arnold.

Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220–245.

Kennedy, E., & Shiel, G. (2019). Writing pedagogy in the senior primary classes: Knowledge, skills and processes for writing. National Council for Curriculum and Assessment.

Lambirth, A. (2016). Exploring children’s discourses of writing. English in Education, 50(3), 215–233.

Thwaite, A. (2019). Halliday’s view of child language learning: Has it been misinterpreted? Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(5), 42–56.