Reading for pleasure has never had more political backing. In July 2025 the Secretary of State for Education announced that 2026 would be England’s National Year of Reading with the National Literacy Trust as delivery partner. Twenty years of research, advocacy and professional development have built a strong case for children’s voluntary, self-chosen reading and a well-developed pedagogy to support it.
There is no National Year of Writing. Yet the latest Annual Literacy Survey from the NLT shows that just 29% of 8-18 year-olds enjoy writing in their free time, and only 12% write something daily outside school. Daily writing has fallen by 15 percentage points since 2010, meaning 56% fewer children now write daily than fifteen years ago (National Literacy Trust, 2026a). Reading enjoyment, by comparison, rose to 36.1% in 2026, its first increase since 2021 (National Literacy Trust, 2026b).
The imbalance is old and deeply rooted. Peter Elbow (2004) noted that we habitually say ‘reading and writing’, never the reverse, and that in government policy ‘literacy’ usually means reading. He argued that this order reflects a cultural model of learning as input, of taking things in, which quietly privileges reading over writing. A National Year of Reading with no counterpart for writing is that model in action.
In a recent article, Kim and colleagues (2024) made a pointed argument about the ‘science of reading’. Public and policy attention to reading instruction, they observed, has largely left writing out of the conversation, and leaving it out runs contrary to both theory and evidence. Their randomised controlled trial showed that providing reading and writing lessons improved the quality of pupils writing, their writing productivity, vocabulary and sentence proficiency. They concluded that reading lessons which do not systematically include elements of writing, and writing lessons which does not systematically include elements of reading, likely do children a disservice.
This article makes the parallel case for the affective side of literacy. If the science of teaching reading is incomplete without the science of writing, then reading for pleasure is incomplete without writing for pleasure. We set out the theoretical grounds for this claim, what the evidence does and does not yet show, and what an integrated pedagogy of ‘literacy for pleasure‘ could look like in classrooms.
Why leaving writing out is contrary to theory and evidence
Reading and writing draw on a common pool of knowledge and processes. Fitzgerald and Shanahan’s (2000) shared knowledge account identifies four kinds that readers and writers both use:
- Metaknowledge about how written language works
- Content knowledge (the stuff they want to write about can come from their reading. This could also include visual literacy and their ‘life texts’)
- Knowledge of text structures/genre conventions
- Procedural knowledge of how to access and combine these
What a child learns about language in one mode is available, at least in principle, to the other.
Kim’s (2020, 2022) Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model develops this further. Reading comprehension and written composition are both built on word-level skills, oral language, higher-order thinking, self-regulation and background knowledge. Crucially for our argument, the model also lists socio-emotional factors, including self-efficacy, attitudes and motivation, among the resources the two can share. It also proposes that the relationship runs in both directions, so that development in one mode can potential boost the development of the other.
The instructional evidence supports this. A meta-analysis of 54 experiments found that reading interventions can improve writing quality and spelling accuracy (Graham et al., 2018b). In the other direction, having pupils write about reading in reading lessons can improve their comprehension of a text. Schools that balance their reading and writing instruction can improve outcomes in both (Graham et al., 2018a). However, there is an important qualification. Kim and colleagues’ (2024) meta-analysis found that while word reading and spelling are very strongly related, reading comprehension and written composition are only moderately related. The two are connected but one does not simply bring the other along with it. A child can become a capable reader without becoming a capable writer, which is exactly why Kim et al. (2025) argue that each needs deliberate instructional attention.
Pleasure belongs to the shared system too
The same logic applies to motivation. If reading and writing skills are related but distinct, so are children’s feelings about reading and writing. Self-efficacy, in particular, is domain-specific: children’s beliefs about their capability as writers predicts their writing performance and is not simply a by-product of their beliefs as readers (Pajares, 2003). Research on writing motivation has developed as a field in its own right precisely because it cannot be read off from reading motivation (Young, 2024).
The NLT’s survey data makes this point vividly. Every year since 2010, children eligible for free school meals have been more likely than their peers to enjoy writing; in 2025 the figures were 31% against 25% (2025). For reading, the pattern runs the other way, and the 2026 rise in reading enjoyment widened the socio-economic gap because it was larger among children not eligible for free school meals (2026b). Whatever lies behind these figures, they don’t suggest a single, undifferentiated ‘love of literacy’.
This matters for two reasons. First, a school can succeed in growing readers and still leave many children feeling cold about writing. Second, writing for pleasure may be an under-used route into literacy engagement for some of the very children that reading for pleasure initiatives find hardest to reach.
My own recent research points the same way. Framed by self-determination theory, I interviewed children aged 9-11 in English primary schools about their writerly needs. Every child described a classroom where the teacher made the writing decisions, with children’s own control largely confined to transcription; those who had chosen their own topics described feeling more motivated and engaged (Young et al., 2025). Children judged their competence as writers on three interwoven grounds: academic, personal and social (Young et al., 2026a). Most understood school writing as an academic exercise for a teacher-evaluator, yet personal connection was what drove their enjoyment, particularly in schools that offered regular personal writing time (Young et al., 2026b).
These are writing-specific conditions: who chooses the topic, how success as a writer is judged, and whether anyone other than the teacher reads the result. Even a strong reading for pleasure programme addresses none of these. A child can choose their own book every day and still have no say over what they write.
What writing for pleasure adds
Writing for pleasure is not simply reading for pleasure’s twin. It offers children things that reading, however enjoyable, cannot.
It is often the easier way in. Elbow (2004) points out that young children can write before they can read, write more than they can read, and write more easily than they read. A beginning reader can only read the words they can decode, but a beginning writer can write any word they can say, using emergent writing and informed spellings. For a young child, writing can offer an early experience of competence that reading cannot yet provide, and competence is one of the roots of pleasure.
It changes how children read. Frank Smith (1983) argued that children learn to write by ‘reading as a writer’, but only once they see themselves as members of a club where people write. A child working on their own picturebook or information texts reads published ones differently, noticing how an author opened a scene or built suspense, because they have a use for it themselves. They read more deeply. Writing gives reading a second purpose: not only to enjoy and understand a text – but to borrow from it.
It moves children from passive audience to proactive author. Elbow (2004) put the contrast quite sharply: ‘Reading is consumption; writing is production.’ Reading asks what someone else had to say; writing asks what the child has to say. Reading for pleasure positions children as choosers and responders, while writing for pleasure adds the agency of making something others will read. Elbow describes classrooms where children’s own books sit in the class library, and children read their own and their classmates’ books. In doing so, they came to see books as things made by people like themselves.
It deepens the reading community. Cremin et al. (2014) showed the importance of reciprocal, interactive communities of readers, led by teachers who read. Communities of writers work in parallel: children share work in progress, talk about craft and respond to one another as authors (Young & Ferguson, 2021). When both exist, book talk and writer talk become the same conversation.
It extends identity. A child who can say ‘I’m a reader and a writer’ has a fuller literate identity than one who can claim only the first. Given the moderate correlation between comprehension and composition, this second identity cannot be assumed to follow from the first – it has to be cultivated.
Developing reading and writing for pleasure
Each element of the established reading for pleasure pedagogy has a writing for pleasure counterpart.
| Reading for pleasure | Writing for pleasure | Where they meet |
| Reading aloud | Teachers sharing their own writing; Children reading aloud their own pieces | Children read peer-authored texts alongside professional ones |
| Independent reading time with choice | Personal writing project time with choice | Ideas from reading can become seeds for writing. Writing can make children look for ‘mentor texts’ that match what they are trying to achieve |
| Informal book talk and recommendations | Writer talk: sharing work in progress, peer response, author’s chair | ‘How did the author do that?’ talk, about published and pupil texts alike |
| Social reading environments | Social writing environments: publishing to audiences, a class library of pupil-authored books | Children’s writing becomes reading material too |
| The reading teacher | The writer-teacher | Teachers who model being both, and talk about how one informs the other in their lives |
Elbow (2004) also offered three ways of putting writing before reading, each of which makes the reading that follows more active:
- Write hunches. Before reading about a topic, children write what they already think, guess or wish were true. They then read to see how their ideas compare. In the process, they have a stake in what the author says.
- Write in the mode. Before studying a published flashback, unreliable narrator or verse form, children can try it themselves as writers. They then read the published piece as fellow writers.
- Write ‘movies of the reader’s mind’. Children read a text in sections and, after each one, jot down their reactions and predictions. This makes visible that reading, like writing, is a process of building and sharing meaning.
Conclusion
Reading and writing share knowledge, processes and, on current theory, motivational resources. Yet the two are only moderately related, so engagement in one cannot be relied on to produce engagement in the other. Reading for pleasure initiatives that make no room for writing, and writing for pleasure initiatives that do not feed into reading, are likely to leave children’s literate lives half-built.
As Elbow (2004) put it, this is not an either/or argument, and the reading-writing connection is not a zero-sum game. Children are likely to read with more care and attention when they have had more chances to write what is on their minds and to take on the role of a writer.
The National Year of Reading has been a real opportunity. Its legacy would be stronger if schools treated it as a year of ‘literacy for pleasure’: children reading as writers, writing for readers, and seeing both as part of who they are.