We have been moved to write this article by a deep care for children’s writerly development, frustration with the systemic issues that perpetuate poor writing instruction, and a clear vision of what writing classrooms could and should be: joyful, purposeful, empowering spaces.
We believe writing deserves its own space. We care deeply about giving children the tools and experiences they need to become real, independent writers. We want to reshape the narrative around how reading and writing interact in classrooms, and offer a hopeful, actionable alternative to the dominant model, one grounded in writerly practices and real-world authenticity.
Writing into reading: The writing classroom’s natural pedagogy
A writing classroom, if it is to be authentic, must regularly pursue what’s called rhetorical purpose. This is the idea that writers write because;
- They have something to say
- They have a reason for saying it
- They have someone to say it to
They are moved to write (Young 2024).
This is at the core of what composition, rhetoric, creative writing and journalism courses all call ‘the rhetorical situation’: there is a writer, there is an audience, there is a purpose, and there is a message.
The writing-into-reading approach therefore begins with a class knowing they have something to say and setting themselves an authentic and purposeful writing goal through which to say it (see LINK for more details). For example: to craft persuasive letters to people in positions of authority, memoirs for loved ones, information texts for their mates, or short stories for the younger children in the school.
Once that intention has been set, teachers and students look outward to high-quality mentor texts that resemble the kind of writing they are looking to produce for themselves. This is reading as a writer: noticing structure, studying grammatical, rhetorical and literary craft moves, analysing authorial voice, and borrowing writerly techniques (Smith 1983; Young & Ferguson 2024).
Taken from Reading In The Writing Classroom (Young & Ferguson 2024), here are just some of the things you can look for and discuss as you read as writers.
And here are some of the writerly conversations you might have.
“Children read stories, poems and letters differently when they see these texts as things they themselves could produce.” – Frank Smith
This approach mirrors how writers actually work. While we in no way seek to diminish the importance of children developing as readers, we need to be clear that, in the writing classroom, writing should be the driver for reading. Reading should be in the service of the writers’ goals.
Here is a beautiful representation of what we are talking about. On the display, we can see just some of the high-quality commercial texts children have been reading as part of their fairytale project. In addition, we can see how writer-teachers have shared their own fairytales as mentor texts too. All this rich reading has resulted in the class coming up with their own success criteria for the project: the things they believe they’ll have to do or include to write their own great fairytales too.
In a writing classroom, the act of reading is responsive, deep, and authentic. Children and teachers study texts together because they know it helps them grow as writers. High-quality mentor texts are chosen because they match the class’ writing project (you can see examples here). This is the real apprenticeship of writing. It gives students agency, craft knowledge, and a deep sense of why being a writer matters.
“To learn how to write for newspapers you must read newspapers. For magazines, browse through magazines. To write poetry, read it.” – Frank Smith
For teachers like Sam Creighton, who love reading, such an approach is a dream come true as he finally gets to expose his class to loads of his favourite high-quality texts. Here are just some of the texts he plans to share with his class as part of their memoir writing project.
Reading into writing: Writers inspired to write by their reading
Reading, in its broadest sense, is another way in which writers find themselves moved to write. Literature has inspired writers for centuries. It inspires children too.
As a result of reading, they sometimes find themselves with a strong desire to write, because they become aware that they have:
- Something to say
- A reason for saying it
- Someone to say it to
At the heart of this joyful integration lies the concept of personal response. When children write about/write inspired by their reading, they give ‘something of themselves back to the text’ (Young & Ferguson 2021). This vital exchange allows them to link what they are reading to their own experiences, feelings, philosophies, cultures and funds-of-knowledge to create something new to say (Young et al. 2021).
This writing can take many forms: they might write about what they learned or reflect on what their reading made them think about. Alternatively, it may have inspired them to create a whole new text. These personal responses, whether conscious or unconscious, often act as a trigger for a story, a poem, a piece of non-fiction or even some ‘faction’.
The different ways in which writers respond to their reading (figure taken from Young & Ferguson 2020, p.94)
Crucially, inviting children to write about their reading introduces them to the natural and powerful concept of intertextuality (Young et al. 2021). This is the understanding that writers are influenced and inspired by everything they read, watch, play, hear and experience. Children are inherently ready to transform these textual experiences into writing. By explicitly teaching about and encouraging intertextuality, we empower children to draw from their ‘reading history and developing identities’ to create their own unique texts (Young et al. 2021).
We’ve written extensively about how best to make such links:
- Bringing pleasure to reading lessons through writing [LINK]
- Literacy for pleasure: Connect reading and writing [LINK]
- Oh, for literature’s sake! How to build reading–writing connections [LINK]
- The Writing Realities Framework [LINK]
We want to conclude this part of the article with a perfect example of what we’ve been talking about so far. We recently accepted an invitation to write a forward for our friend’s book. Now, we’ve never written a forward before, so our first impulse, as writers, was to read lots of forwards! This was using the writing-into-reading approach. However, we also needed to read the book so we could have something to say about it. This was how, as writers, we were utilising the reading-into-writing approach.
The problematic book-planning approach
The book-planning approach, by contrast, is essentially a presentational-skills approach to teaching writing (see LINK for more details). This is where developers of book-planning schemes misunderstand (and mishandle) the relationship between reading and writing.
The process begins with a text, often a novel, and is usually selected by a scheme-writer who has never met the children in the class. Students read it (usually over a number of weeks), discuss its themes, and complete a series of short writing tasks dreamt up by the scheme-writer. These tasks often take the form of character diaries, letters in role, and fictitious newspaper articles. Ultimately, these are reading tasks, perhaps valuable in moderation, and within the context of the reading classroom – but certainly not a foundation for developing lifelong writers.
Unfortunately, the book-planning approach positions writing as a mere follow-up activity, a reciting of the scheme-writer’s ideas. Under such an approach, students do not generate original pieces, nor do they learn about genres, audience awareness, or study mentor texts aligned to their genuine writerly goals. Instead, they are ‘boxed’ into producing what’s called ‘writing-related simulations’ tethered to a single text. The result is inauthentic writing, built on tired and borrowed ideas.
If we go back to the elements of ‘the rhetorical situation’, we can see why the book-planning approach is so problematic:
- The scheme writer or teacher has decided what the class is to say
- The teacher is often the only person they are saying it to
- Children are saying it solely for the purpose of teacher assessment; to demonstrate that they have understood the text in the ways the scheme-writer deems acceptable.
The young writers are left out of the process entirely.
This approach may sometimes produce a superficial level of writing competency, but it certainly doesn’t produce independent writers (see LINK for more details). This is because it stifles children’s voice, limits their ownership, and instead trains them to see writing not as a powerful tool for their own thinking, feeling, expressing, entertaining, teaching, persuading, or creating, but as a response to the scheme-writer’s reading of a text. Children quickly learn that their job is to simply transcribe the scheme-writer’s ideas onto paper, ready for teacher-evaluation.
Young writers deserve a genuine writerly apprenticeship
At its heart, writing instruction should offer students an apprenticeship in real writing practices. This means:
- Starting with an authentic and purposeful publishing goal [LINK]
- Thinking about audience and genre from the beginning [LINK]
- Reading as writers read [LINK]
- Writing in response to their reading, just as writers do [LINK]
- Generating writing ideas that they and their audience will enjoy, learn from, respond to, or appreciate [LINK]
- Making genuine and independent authorial choices [LINK]
This can only happen in a writing classroom where writing leads the way. Through the writing-into-reading and reading-into-writing approaches, students learn to think as writers: to read not just for comprehension, but to search for writerly techniques, structures, inspiration, and effects. They learn to be curious. They discover that writing is about crafting – and about learning from master crafters.
Align purpose with practice
Choosing a writing-into-reading approach is more than just making a pedagogical shift, it is a philosophical commitment to teaching writing as it truly exists in the world.
It’s not about discarding literature or downplaying reading, quite the opposite! Instead, it’s about putting high-quality texts back into children’s hands. It’s about showing how reading can serve rather than take away the possibility of authentic and purposeful writing.
As you’ve seen, we actually want students to be reading more high-quality texts. But that reading must be placed in a meaningful relationship with writing. If your goal is to teach students to be writers – powerful, authentic, and independent writers – then the writing classroom must be driven by writerly practices. And reading as writers read is essential to that work.
Due to the commercial popularity of book-based writing schemes, it can take not a little courage to shift towards a writer-centred approach to teaching writing. Read that sentence again. What a strange educational world we live in that we even have to say that!
Concluding thoughts
We were moved to write this article out of deep concern for the writerly education children and young people are currently receiving, specifically, how inauthentic and limited writing becomes under the dominant ‘book-based’ model and out of a strong desire to advocate for a more authentic, writer-centered pedagogy.
We had something to say: We wanted to challenge the book-planning approach, which prioritises comprehension-driven writing tasks over real, independent writing. We wanted to argue that this method diminishes students’ agency and voice as writers.
We had a reason for saying it: There’s currently a misalignment between how writing is often taught in schools (as a derivative activity tethered to reading schemes) and how writers in the real world actually live and work. We believe this undermines the development of young people as authentic writers and thinkers.
We wrote to:
- Advocate for the writing-into-reading and reading-into-writing approaches.
- Show that writing is a discipline in its own right, not a servant to reading.
- Emphasise the need for authenticity, agency, purpose, and audience in the writing classroom.
We had someone to say it to: Our audience was:
- Teachers who may feel uneasy with book-based schemes but aren’t sure what the alternative looks like.
- Educators who love literature, and might be more persuaded if they see that embracing a writer-centered pedagogy actually enhances rather than diminishes children’s reading.
- Policy-makers and shakers who shape national approaches to writing.