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“Hi Ross and Phil. We recently had a school improvement advisor suggest that we only use dictation in the FS and Year One for our writing lessons. We’re sure this isn’t the right way to go…”

Dictation can help teachers check children’s practised spelling. What the studies don’t show is that it improves children’s handwriting, fluency, punctuation or the quality of their writing. It perhaps belongs in spelling lessons but not writing lessons.

You read a sentence aloud. Your class writes it down. You check their spellings, handwriting, capital letters and full stops. It’s certainly easy to run. In some schools, it has become a writing lesson in itself, with children taking down the teacher’s sentences instead of composing their own.

Dictation can be used for three quite different things: to assess spelling, to practise spelling and to teach writing. The evidence supports the first, only partly supports the second and doesn’t support the third.

Two things that are often conflated

When people say dictation ‘works’, they can mean two quite different things:

• Getting better at dictation. By practising dictation, children get better at dictation activities. Children make fewer errors when you dictate sentences to them.
• Using the skills in their own writing. Children spell, form letters or punctuate more fluently and accurately in their own future writing.

The second is the one that matters in a writing lesson. Most of the evidence offered for dictation is about the first.

None of this makes the first kind of evidence trivial. Dictation is a standard way of testing spelling knowledge, and a child who can now spell a word when it is read aloud has genuinely learned something. The questions are: what produced that learning, and does it transfer when children choose and spell words in their own writing? Measuring that is certainly harder, because, if taught badly, children can avoid words they can’t spell conventionally [LINK, for more on this].

Where the claim comes from

The case for dictation rests on a sound idea. When a child has to think hard about how to spell a word or form a letter, they have less attention left for what they want to say. Make spelling and handwriting automatic and children can concentrate on their ideas more.

Dictation is offered as a way to get there: it lets children practise spelling, handwriting and punctuation without the demand of well… actually writing.

If dictation is offered as one way to practise spelling in spelling lessons, evidence that children spell the practised words better is a fair test. If it is offered as a way to improve children’s writing, or as a routine for writing lessons, the evidence needs to come from children’s writing.

The one recent comparison study

We found one recent classroom study of teacher sentence dictation with a comparison group: Robinson-Kooi and Hammond (2020). Year 2 pupils in one Australian school were taught spelling patterns, capital letters and full stops explicitly, then practised them through daily sentence dictation. They outperformed pupils at another school who carried on with their usual spelling programme. However, the study is worth looking at closely:

• A very small sample. Two schools: 35 children in two intervention classes against 25 in one comparison class.
• One class may have ‘carried’ the result. The paper reports that it was only one of the intervention classes that consistently outperformed every other class. One strong teacher could explain much of the difference.
• Dictation was never isolated. Unfortunately, children also received explicit teaching of phonics, morphology and proof-reading. With this in mind, we don’t know if it was dictation that brought about the improvements. It could well have been the other things.
• Dictation was also the test. Dictation is a reasonable way to test spelling, but children who practise dictated sentences daily and are then tested on dictated sentences have an advantage over a comparison group that never practised the format of the test.
• Children’s own writing wasn’t measured. It is a spelling and punctuation study.

Does dictation improve spelling?

This is where dictation has its best case, but even here it is under quite narrow conditions.

The oldest comparison found no benefit. In 1954, a French school inspector compared 23 classes of 10-11 year-olds who did dictation for a year with 23 classes who did other work instead. Their spelling progressed equally. He concluded that dictation had no influence on progress in spelling. A national commission in the 1960s reached a similar view: dictation could not be treated as a genuine means of learning spelling (Cogis, Fisher & Nadeau, 2015).

The classic format isn’t the best one. A French study compared ordinary dictation with guided dictation, where children got given strategies and clues and discussed the sentences together afterwards. Guided dictation worked better for average and weaker spellers. Strong spellers made no progress with either (Le Brun et al., 2016).

Spelling learnt through dictation is rarely checked in children’s own writing. Of the teaching studies we found that used dictation, only three looked at how children’s spelling translated to writing their own texts.

• Identical dictation, different results. In a US trial, around one hundred 8-9-year-olds who were struggling to write were taught in pairs by a tutor over 24 short sessions. Two groups did the same spelling practice, including six minutes a session of writing words from dictation, with the correct spelling shown straight away and missed words retaught. Both groups got better at spelling the taught words. But only one group spelled more words correctly in their own essays afterwards: the one that also played word-sorting games exploring the different ways the same sound can be spelled. The group that did the same dictation alongside composition teaching showed no change in the spelling of their essays. The authors attribute the transfer to the explicit teaching of these alternative spellings (Berninger et al., 2002). Dictation wasn’t isolated, though: no group was taught spelling without it, and the group that improved also had more spelling time. So the study shows that dictation with feedback wasn’t enough on its own to improve children’s spelling in their own future writing.
• Better on the test. In a Portuguese trial, seven-year-olds were taught spelling patterns, and the programme ended with three review lessons in which children wrote dictated words and explained their spellings. They got better at spelling the trained words in the dictated test that followed. However, the spellings in their stories did not improve (Alves et al., 2016).
• A dictation score doesn’t tell you how a child spells in their own writing. Italian researchers gave 81 six-year-olds a dictated text and asked them to write their own story. How a child did on one did not predict how they did on the other. The authors concluded that the two tasks draw on different spelling processes (Bigozzi et al., 2016).

Spelling teaching can reach children’s writing. In contrast to dictation, a review of 53 studies found that formal spelling instruction improved spelling in children’s own writing, not just on tests (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).

Does dictation improve handwriting?

We found no study testing whether dictation improves children’s handwriting. The handwriting research points somewhere else: spend your time explicitly teaching children how letters are formed.

• Explicit handwriting teaching works. Across studies from Reception to secondary, teaching handwriting improves legibility and fluency compared with no handwriting teaching (Santangelo & Graham, 2016; (López-Escribano et al., 2022). The teaching in these studies centred on modelling letter formation and supervised practice. Neither review identifies dictation as a practice.
• There is also a practical problem. During dictation, children write at the speed of your sentence, and you can’t watch 30 children’s letter formation as it happens. A child who forms letters incorrectly practises the incorrect movement, at speed. This goes against what the handwriting studies say works: specific attention to letter formation.

Does dictation build fluency that helps children write?

Some claim that dictation makes spelling and handwriting faster and more automatic, and that fluency then frees children to concentrate on composing when they eventually do get to write for themselves.

• Does dictation build fluency? We found no study that measured handwriting speed or spelling fluency after a dictation programme. The handwriting reviews described above focus on letter formation, timed practice and feedback. Neither list dictation as an approach.
• Dictation is poorly designed for fluency. Fluency practice works by pushing children to write a little faster than is comfortable. In dictation, you set the pace, usually slowly and word by word, so no one is left behind.
• Does fluency improve children’s writing? Here there is good evidence. Fluent handwriting and spelling tend to go hand in hand with better writing. Explicit handwriting lessons can influence the quality of children’s writing as fluent hand writers are better able to focus on their ideas and write at length (Santangelo & Graham, 2016; Alves et al., 2016). The studies included no dictation, and the authors suggest that regular opportunities to compose may help explain the largest effects. Keeping this point in mind, other trials have improved children’s  transcription without improving their writing. In the first-grade trial described earlier, handwriting got faster and more legible, but children’s writing didn’t get longer or better (Graham et al., 2018). In a Swiss trial, two hundred 8-9-year-olds did 20 short handwriting and spelling sessions; there were almost no lasting gains in fluency and no effect on the quality of their writing (Hurschler Lichtsteiner et al., 2018). And the two large reviews discussed below found that teaching transcription on its own had no significant effect on writing quality.

Activities designed to build fluency don’t reliably make children better writers. Where transcription has helped composition, it has usually been taught directly, and often alongside composition itself.

Dictation has made no contribution to improvements in writing fluency.

Does dictation improve punctuation?

The evidence here is even thinner.

Robinson-Kooi and Hammond’s Year 2 study taught capital letters and full stops and then checked them through dictation tests. Children got better at punctuating dictated sentences in the tests. However, we’ve found no study showing dictation improves punctuation in children’s own writing.

Does dictation improve children’s own writing?

We found no study that measured this. The wider research on spelling, handwriting, fluency and punctuation teaching gives us little reason to expect it.

• For 5-9-year-olds, spelling and handwriting teaching alone doesn’t improve children’s writing. A review of 24 studies found that teaching transcription on its own has no significant effect on any measure of their writing. In fact, its effect on writing quality was slightly negative. It doesn’t even reliably increase how much children write. In contrast, teaching children writing strategies alongside ways to manage their own writing has a large effect on writing quality (Kim et al., 2021).
• Transcription-only teaching is the weakest route to better writing. A 2026 review pooled 70 studies of writing interventions from Reception to secondary. Teaching transcription alone (spelling, handwriting or keyboarding) had no statistically significant effect on either the quality of children’s writing or how much they wrote. Practices which also teach composition have much better effects on writing quality. Practices that teach composition without a transcription component have the largest effect on the quality of children’s writing (Guo et al., 2026). The authors suggest transcription teaching on its own is too detached from the act of writing to carry over into composition.
• When transcription is taught with composition, the picture changes. Among the studies that did include transcription, Guo and colleagues found the largest effects where transcription and composition were both taught explicitly, with time given to each. When struggling 8-9-year-olds were taught spelling and composition together, it was the only approach that improved both their spelling and the quality of their persuasive essays. And when 6-7-year-olds were taught spelling and handwriting alongside planning strategies and the writing process, they wrote better information texts, planned more effectively, and spelt better than their peers (Harris et al., 2023). The lesson isn’t that transcription doesn’t matter. It’s that it matters most when it is taught in the service of children pursuing their own writing, which is precisely what dictation doesn’t provide.

And motivation? We found no study that measured how dictation affects children’s motivation to write, their confidence or their enjoyment. Whether a daily routine of reproducing someone else’s sentence and having errors marked helps or harms children’s sense of themselves as writers is a question that has yet to be answered.

Writing time is precious. Teaching children writing strategies, how texts are structured and simply giving them more time to write all improve the quality of primary children’s writing (Graham et al., 2012). Ten minutes of dictation in a writing lesson is ten minutes not spent utilising evidence-informed practices that have a track record of success (LINK for more details on this).

What is dictation good for?

The evidence points to two legitimate uses.

As an assessment tool for spelling. Dictation is a standard way of testing spelling. A dictated word or sentence lets you check exactly the patterns you have taught, which can sometimes be hard (or time consuming) to find in children’s own writing. But writing and dictation draw on different spelling processes, so use both: dictated words for the patterns you have taught, and children’s own writing for how they spell when it counts most.

As spelling practice. Writing words from memory with immediate correction can help children learn those spellings (Jones et al., 2016; Memory, 2023). However, the gains are mostly specific to the words practised; wider improvement seems to depend on explicit teaching of spelling patterns (Berninger et al., 2002). So choose the words carefully, such as high-frequency words children use in their writing or words that show a pattern you have taught, and check whether they turn up spelt correctly in children’s own writing.

Not as a writing lesson or a writing pedagogy!

What the evidence does not support is dictation as a writing pedagogy, where children transcribe the teacher’s sentences instead of composing their own. No study we found shows that this improves children’s writing, and it takes time away from evidence-informed practices that do [LINK and LINK for more details on this].

In summary

Dictation is a spelling tool at best. It can help teachers check children’s spelling and help children learn the words they practise. Beyond that, the evidence runs out.

• Spelling: dictation is a fair way to practise and check spelling, and writing words from memory with immediate correction helps. But dictation has never been isolated from the other spelling teaching around it, the one comparison of traditional dictation with other spelling work found no benefit, and whether it reaches children’s own writing is rarely measured.
• Handwriting: no study has tested it. However, we know handwriting improves through explicit teaching of letter formation with close supervision.
• Fluency: no study has shown that dictation makes spelling or handwriting faster, and faster transcription on its own doesn’t reliably improve children’s writing anyway.
• Punctuation: Nothing shows that punctuating dictated sentences carries over to children’s own writing.

The question isn’t whether children should ever write down a sentence read aloud. It’s whether success at reproducing someone else’s sentence should be mistaken for learning how to write. It shouldn’t.

On the evidence, dictation has a place in spelling lessons, as one way to check and practise spelling among several.

Dictation has no evidence-backed place as a writing pedagogy.

 

When a five-year-old writes DRAGN for dragon, it is tempting to say that they’ve simply misspelt the word. A better description is that the child has heard every consonant, represented them in the right order, and has not yet learned how English marks the unstressed vowel in the second syllable.

Every spelling a child produces is a snapshot of what they currently know about how words work: sounds, letters, patterns, meaning and word history. Read that way, a non-conventional spelling is not a failure but interesting evidence of spelling development. It shows us what the child has secured, what they are using but confusing, and what they have not yet met.

This matters because their spelling changes over time. Children’s spellings of the same word can shift over months and years, driven by our teaching, reading, writing for real purposes and feedback from their teachers. This article explains why spelling should be understood developmentally, traces how familiar words change from emergent writing through to conventional spelling, and sets out what this means for classroom practice.

What the research says

Children’s spellings are rarely random. Charles Read’s (1971) study of preschoolers’ spellings showed that young children make principled, consistent decisions based on how sounds are produced in the mouth. A child who writes CHRAN for train is not guessing: before /r/, the /t/ in train really is pronounced close to /tʃ/.

Building on this, researchers described a broad developmental progression. Gentry (1982) analysed one child’s writing over several years, drawing on Bissex’s (1980) case study GNYS AT WRK. Bear and colleagues (2016) later organised the progression into phases:

These phases are useful but should not be read too literally. Treiman and Kessler (2014) argue that children learn about the statistical patterns of writing from very early on, before they can represent sounds. Rittle-Johnson and Siegler (1999) found that children use several phases at once, so the same child may spell a word conventionally on Monday and phonetically on Tuesday. Development is better described as overlapping waves eventually working their way up the shore rather than as a staircase.

Adoniou (2016) rightly adds that English spelling represents meaning and history as well as sound. A child who has been taught only to ‘sound it out’ will quickly reach the limits of that strategy.

How spellings of the same word change over time

The table below shows typical attempts at common words as children move from emergent writing to conventional spelling. The examples are illustrative. In reality, children will not pass neatly through every column, and may even produce two versions of a spelling in a single piece of writing.

What each attempt reveals

• Emergent. Children know writing is different from drawing and use particular scribbles or letter-like shapes. They will often borrow letters from their own name. They have also been known to use more letters for bigger objects and less letters for things that are small.
• Early letter name. B for bed shows the child has isolated the first sound and linked it to a letter. J for train is a sound-based choice: say “tr” and “j” and feel how similar they are.
• Late letter name. BAD and SEP use the letter whose name is closest to the short vowel. MOSTR omits the /n/ before a consonant.
• Within word pattern. TRANE and FLOTE show the child knows about long vowels, but has not yet learnt which pattern a particular word takes.
• Syllables, affixes and meaning. JUMPT spells what is heard; JUMPED shows the child now knows -ed marks the past tense whatever its sound. HOPEING shows a child applying a pattern from hope; HOPPING shows they have learned the doubling convention. COMPUTITION becomes competition once the child sees the link to the base word compete.

At every point, the attempt makes sense given what the child currently knows. There is much to celebrate in all of these spelling attempts. Lazily, calling these ‘misspellings’ does children a disservice and erases the very information a teacher needs.

What moves children’s spelling on

Spelling development is not automatic or guaranteed. A child does not move from TRANE to TRAIN simply by getting older. There are four influences:

Teaching. Explicit spelling instruction improves children’s spelling, and its effects extend to reading and writing (Graham & Santangelo, 2014). The most effective teaching explains why words are spelled as they are, covering sound, patterns, meaning and history (Adoniou, 2016). Teaching pitched at what a child is currently “using but confusing” is likelier to stick than teaching far ahead of, or behind, their current understanding (Bear et al., 2016).

Reading. Each time children decode an unfamiliar word, they store information about its spelling (Share, 1995). Wide reading builds a bank of word-specific knowledge and a feel for which patterns are likely. However, reading alone is rarely enough. Being able to recognise a word is a lot easier than producing it from memory for writing.

Writing. Children need frequent opportunities to write for real purposes and readers. Every attempt is practice in segmenting words, choosing letters and applying patterns. Feldgus and colleagues (2017) show how the ‘kid writing’ writing strategy gives teachers a running record of children’s spelling development. You can quite literally see the gaps in children’s understanding. For those who are not familiar with the strategy: you ask children to write down the adult parts of a word that they do know and use a line or ‘kid writing’ for the parts they don’t know yet. This is a brilliant strategy as it means children will attempt any word that they really want to write. No longer do children simply play it safe by choosing words they know they can already spell conventionally. You also no longer need to hear ‘Miss, I don’t know how to spell…’ You can simply ask them to use their ‘kid writing’. Here’s an example of what it can look like: 

Teacher feedback. Responsive feedback and the use of ‘underwriting’ names what a child got right as well as what to change to make it more like adult writing in the future. Feedback should focus on what the child is ready for, rather than correcting every single word. It is most powerful when it happens close to the writing and links back to what has been taught. Feedback on spelling comes at too high a price if the result is that the children never wants to write again.

Reading a child’s spelling diagnostically

A child’s attempt is most useful when the teacher asks what it shows rather than whether it is right. Three questions help:

1. What is secure? Which sounds, patterns or morphemes are represented correctly? MONSTUR shows every consonant in order, including the tricky /n/.
2. What is the child using but confusing? Patterns applied in the wrong place (HOPEING, FLOWT) show knowledge in the making. This is usually the best place to teach next.
3. What is absent? Features not attempted at all, such as vowels in every syllable, are not yet within reach and may need additional teaching.

Not every non-conventional spelling is developmental. Like all of us, some are just slips under pressure: a child who spells said correctly in isolation may write SED while concentrating on their story dialogue. It happens to the best of us. Some spellings also reflect children’s accents. For example, when a child writes FINK because that is how they say think. Some reflect gaps in teaching: a child cannot be expected to use a pattern they have never been shown. And where a child’s spellings stay at the same point for a long time despite good teaching, that is a signal for closer assessment. See our guidance on spelling interventions [LINK].

What this means for practice

• Change the language. Talk about a child’s ‘spelling attempt’ or ‘great try for a seven year old!’ rather than ‘mistakes’. Always celebrate what is right first: “Whoa! Excellent! You’ve heard every sound in monster. That’s really well done for a five year old. Now let’s look at how adults write the last bit.”
• Protect composition. Encourage children to write the word as best they can and keep going, then return to spelling during proofreading. Stopping to fix every word mid-sentence costs ideas and confidence. Teach children how to write ‘temporary spelling’ before putting a circle around them to highlight that these will need checking when it comes to proof-reading time.
• Teach one thing next. Choose one thing the child is using but confusing and teach it explicitly, with explanation. Correcting every non-conventional word in a piece teaches nothing in particular. It just kills any confidence and risk-taking the child might have had.
• Connect reading and writing. Draw attention to interesting spellings in shared reading and invite children to hunt for patterns they are learning.

References and further reading 

• Adoniou, M. (2016). Spelling it out: How words work and how to teach them. Cambridge University Press.
• Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2016). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (6th ed., Global ed.). Pearson.
• Bissex, G. L. (1980). GNYS AT WRK: A child learns to write and read. Harvard University Press.
• Feldgus, E. G., Cardonick, I., & Gentry, J. R. (2017). Kid writing in the 21st century. Hameray Publishing.
• Ferreiro, E., & Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Heinemann.
• Gentry, J. R. (1982). An analysis of developmental spelling in GNYS AT WRK. The Reading Teacher, 36(2), 192–200.
• Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27(9), 1703–1743.
• Read, C. (1971). Pre-school children’s knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Review, 41(1), 1–34.
• Rittle-Johnson, B., & Siegler, R. S. (1999). Learning to spell: Variability, choice, and strategy use. Child Development, 70(2), 332–348.
• Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218.
• Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2014). How children learn to write words. Oxford University Press.
• Westwood, P. (2014). Teaching spelling: Exploring commonsense strategies and best practices. Routledge.

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:

1. Metaknowledge about how written language works
2. Content knowledge (the stuff they want to write about can come from their reading. This could also include visual literacy and their ‘life texts’)
3. Knowledge of text structures/genre conventions
4. 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.

We recommend reading the PDF version of this article as the formatting is much better [LINK].

Last year, we shared our Writing Map [LINK], a writing equivalent of Christopher Such’s reading map [LINK]. It’s something we use in our professional development. However, colleagues working in Nursery and Reception have been asking us a very reasonable question: What does the science of writing look like before children can write conventionally?

This article is our answer. The Emergent Writing Development Model zooms in on the very beginning of the writing map. It sets out what the youngest of writers are developing, what conditions let that development happen, and how the visible products of their writing typically change over time.

We think it’s important that early years teachers and school leaders have a secure understanding of how young children become writers. Early writing pedagogy is an area where folk wisdom, inherited habits and well-meaning caution have too often filled the space where research evidence should be (Young & Ferguson 2027). A shared model gives us a shared language and a shared set of expectations.

You can see the model below. Let’s take a look at it, step by step.

Conceptualising emergent writing

At the centre of the model sits a single definition: emergent writing is purposeful communication through the increasingly sophisticated use of marks, letters, words and conventions.

Every element of the model exists to support that core act of meaning-making and meaning-sharing.

Emergent writing is not a preparatory stage before ‘real’ writing begins. It is real writing in the sense that matters developmentally. Children use scribbles, drawings, letter-like shapes, strings of letters and ‘informed spellings’ to represent their meaning.

The difficulty for teachers is that emergent writing does not develop in a neat, single straight line. It doesn’t develop one domain at a time, nor at a matched pace across domains. A child’s growing understanding that writing carries meaning, their oral language, their ability to segment spoken words into sounds, their transcription skills, their sense of themselves as ‘a person who writes’, and the responses they get from their readers are all developing at the same time and shaping one another.

The model therefore separates three questions that are too often collapsed into one:

• What develops? → the eight domains.
• What supports this development? → the four conditions.
• What does it look like on the page? → the trajectory.

Each domain has a direct, two-way relationship with the centre. Development in a domain improves a child’s communication, and meaningful communication gives each domain a reason to develop. The domains also influence their neighbours, which is why the model is drawn as a ring rather than as a ladder.

The eight domains

1. Ideas and purpose – Why I am writing this

Ideas and purpose is the child’s sense of why they are making marks at all. Long before children can write conventionally, they use writing for recognisably distinct purposes: to express something personal, tell someone about an event, entertain, record something they want to remember, or imitate the writing they’ve seen adults do. What they choose to write is heavily shaped by their interests, play and experiences.

When early years teachers support children’s composing, their pupils end the year with stronger name-writing and spelling skills (Young & Ferguson, 2027).

2. Oral language and thinking – What I can say and think

Before a child can compose a written sentence, they draw on the vocabulary, sentence structures, narrative know-how and background knowledge of their spoken language. Oral language predicts the quality of children’s writing throughout the early years (Young & Ferguson, 2027). There is no point at which a child has ‘enough’ vocabulary to begin writing. Instead, oral language keeps feeding writing and writing keeps feeding oral language development.

Talking through what you are about to write (oral rehearsal) is one of the most powerful supports available to an emergent writer (Young & Ferguson, 2027). It lets thinking and language happen ahead of, and separately from, the physically demanding act of transcription.

3. Phonological and alphabet Knowledge – What I know about sounds and letters

Phonological awareness (noticing and manipulating rhyme, syllables and individual sounds) and alphabet knowledge (letter names and the sounds they represent) give a child the knowledge they need for producing informed, and eventually conventional, spelling.

• Encoding = segmenting a spoken word into sounds and matching those sounds to letters.
• Informed spelling = the observable product of a child attempting to encode before conventional spelling is secure.
• ‘Kid writing’ = a strategy in which children write the sounds they know and leave a line for the sounds they don’t know – yet (Feldgus et al. 2017).

A phonetically plausible spelling is not an error to be stamped out. It is highly informative. The quality of children’s informed spelling in the early years predicts their later reading and spelling skills (Ouellette & Sénéchal 2008, 2017) and children who are supported to encode make gains in spelling, word reading and writing motivation (Young & Ferguson, 2027).

4. Transcription skills – How I form my writing

Transcription is the physical act of getting language onto the page: letter formation, recognisable words and the gradual use of spaces and punctuation.

Letter writing develops gradually. Explicit handwriting instruction works. However,  motor-skills-only programmes do not (Santangelo & Graham 2016).

5. Concepts of print – What I know about how writing works

Concepts about print are the conventions that govern written language as a system: that print carries meaning, how books are organised, directionality, that words are separated by spaces, and that different text types look and work differently (Young & Ferguson, 2027).

Alongside name writing and letter knowledge, print knowledge at school entry is among the strongest predictors of later writing attainment (Dunsmuir & Blatchford, 2004). Children build these concepts most securely by using print for a purpose (Young & Ferguson, 2027).

6. Drawing – How I support my writing

Drawing is a powerful support for children’s writing. They use it to plan and clarify their ideas before committing it to text. It is part of the composing process – not decoration.

When Mackenzie (2011) asked teachers to make drawing central to writing for the first six months of schooling, children produced texts that were more complex than those they produced through words alone. Drawing also takes the child’s plan out of working memory and puts it onto the page, where it can be seen and returned to.

7. Social interaction and Ffeedback – What I know about writing with others

For a young child, writing is rarely a solitary act. Shared writing, conversations about what a piece says, responsive feedback, and the modelling of teachers and more experienced peers all move a child’s writing beyond what they could produce alone. Children influence one another’s writing through image, movement and talk. The richest writing often happens in teacher- and peer-mediated circumstances (Young & Ferguson, 2027).

8. Motivation and identity – Why I want to write

Motivation and identity is the child’s relationship with writing: their interest and enjoyment, their sense of themselves as someone who writes, their perceived competence and their sense of agency over what and how they write.

A child can be transcriptionally and compositionally competent and still be minimally engaged, and as a result underperform. Conversely, a highly motivated child can write beyond what is ever predicted. Teacher assessment of children’s attitudes to writing is strongly associated with writing competence at age seven (Dunsmuir & Blatchford, 2004). Children in the early years can make distinct judgments about the value of writing, their self-concept as writers and their enjoyment of it (Mata, 2011).

The conditions that support development

These conditions determine the extent to which a child’s developing skills, knowledge and motivation get expressed, practised and extended.

A child can have considerable phonological and transcriptional knowledge and still write very little if the conditions around them don’t invite it.

Conversely, a child may have lots of opportunities to write made available to them in their environment, but may not have received the necessary instruction and support to develop the skills needed to produce their best writing.

Condition	What it involves
Environment	Print-rich spaces, ready access to varied writing materials, and protected time to write and to revisit earlier writing. Emergent writers often return to a piece across several sessions. One-off writing episodes under-represent what children can do.
Culture & Community	The value that caregivers, peers, teachers and the wider community visibly place on children’s writing; the rich cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge children already bring to Nursery or school; and real-life purposes for writing at home, school and in the community.
Autonomy & Choice	Children’s agency over their writing topics and their decision-making power over their writing.
Teacher Role	Intentional teaching, instruction, modelling, scaffolding, close observation and feedback.

Why does this matter? Because the evidence suggests these conditions are frequently absent. Many preschoolers experience as little as one minute of writing a day (Campbell et al., 2019). Writing in play areas is high-quality when it happens, but it is surprisingly rare (Quinn et al., 2022). Moreover, it is the quality of teachers’ instruction, modelling and interactions that predicts children’s writing growth (Guo et al., 2012).

The developmental trajectory of children’s writing

1. Mark making – scribbles with no stable sound-symbol relationship, but already an intentional and communicative activity.
2. Emergent scribbling – more controlled scribbles whose meaning is closely tied to the child’s accompanying talk and drawing.
3. Letter-like forms and conventional letters – some marks become recognisable as letters or letter-like shapes.
4. Informed spelling and word writing – letters begin to represent sounds systematically.
5. Early conventional writing – spelling becomes more accurate, sentences are written and print conventions are applied more consistently.

We’ve drawn this as a strip. However, there are two important cautions:

• The phases overlap. Children frequently show features of more than one phase at once, particularly across different types of writing project. Development is often step-like, with rapid gains followed by plateaus of consolidation. It can be like the tide on the shore: great strides forward, then a retreat to what they know (Harmey & Wilkinson, 2019).
• The trajectory describes the page, not the child. A child capable of sophisticated oral composition may still be producing emergent scribbles because their transcription hasn’t caught up yet. A child with accurate transcription may still produce very little if they haven’t had the time and support to develop their drawings and ideas. To understand what’s really going on, you have to look across all the domains.

Teachers wanting a finer-grained tool will find Papadopoulos’s (2026) writing development rubric a useful complement to the five phases, as it helps locate exactly which domain, or which part of a domain, is holding a child’s writing back.

Once children begin encoding, our five-phases of spelling development takes over:

(Young & Ferguson, 2027)

What now?

While we offer one-off professional development sessions to schools and MATs, and recognise their value in strengthening schools’ conceptual understanding of writing and help them identify areas for improvement, we believe long-term and sustained support is essential for translating this knowledge into effective classroom practice. Most schools we work with ultimately seek more than just theoretical guidance – they want to implement a reassuringly consistent approach to writing teaching that they can adopt, adapt, and use as a foundation for change. In these cases, we typically introduce the theoretical foundations of writing instruction before guiding schools through our Writing For Pleasure approach that balances four key priorities:

• Checking the school’s provision for explicitly teaching encoding, handwriting and spelling.
• Developing children’s writing fluency in the EYFS and KS1.
• Providing opportunities for students to craft purposeful and authentic writing.
• Engaging students and teachers in discussions about writing to deepen their understanding of the craft.

To achieve these priorities, we introduce three core writing structures:

• Short ‘book-making’ projects: Focused intervention projects which build automaticity and accuracy in encoding and support sentence construction and cohesion.
• Reading as writers: Analytical and reflective discussions of mentor texts that help students establish ambitious goals for their writing.
• Class writing projects: Opportunities for students to generate ideas, plan, draft, revise, proof-read and publish extended pieces of writing.

These structures are not anything complex. They simply make practical the principles of world-class writing teaching [LINK for more on this]. They support teachers while allowing them flexibility for adaptation and ongoing improvement.

Our support also extends far beyond writing lessons. We help schools tackle challenges such as assessment, supporting children with specific writing difficulties, helping English language learners, and fostering a school-wide culture of writer-teachers. The majority of our work with schools can be summarised as follows:

1. Providing constructive feedback on schools’ current approach to writing instruction and their writing curriculum, either through online discussions or in-person consultancy.
2. Helping classroom teachers and school leaders develop a deeper understanding of writing development so they can make evidence-informed instructional decisions that feel right for their school.
3. Outlining our Writing For Pleasure approach so that schools can adopt, adapt, or use it as a foundation for further development.

Finally, we work hard to provide free or very affordable alternatives to our consultancy work. We believe passionately in ensuring that high-quality professional development is accessible to as many teachers as possible.

1. Anyone can send us a message via email, Twitter, Facebook or Blue Sky with any questions, and we’ll do our best to answer them.
2. We hear from many schools who have used our website to drive their own CPD. You can access all our free CPD materials here.
3. Individual teachers can purchase our eBook How To Teach Writing for £5.95. Schools can purchase a licence for all their staff to gain access for £54.75 [LINK].
4. Teachers can purchase an individual licence to our website for £28.50 a year. This gives them access to all our eBooks, unit plans and resources [LINK].
5. Schools can purchase a whole-school licence to our website for £400 a year. This gives everyone access to our eBooks, programme of study, assessment guidance, CPD materials, units plans and resources. If you’re a smaller school, get in touch as we may be able to provide you with a discount [LINK].

If you want to get in touch, you can use our contact form or email us: hello@writing4pleasure.com

Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson

References and further reading

• Adams, A. M., Soto-Calvo, E., Francis, H. N., Patel, H., Hartley, C., Giofrè, D., & Simmons, F. R. (2021) Characteristics of the preschool home literacy environment which predict writing skills at school. Reading and Writing, 34(9), 2203-2225.
• Bingham, G. E., Quinn, M. F., & Gerde, H. K. (2017) Examining early childhood teachers’ writing practices: Associations between pedagogical supports and children’s writing skills. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 39, 35-46.
• Bissex, G. (1980) Gnys at Wrk: A Child Learns to Write and Read. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cabell, S. Q., Gerde, H. K., Hwang, H., Bowles, R., Skibbe, L., Piasta, S. B., & Justice, L. M. (2022) Rate of growth of preschool-age children’s oral language and decoding skills predicts beginning writing ability. Early Education and Development, 33(7), 1198-1221.
• Campbell, K., Chen, Y. J., Shenoy, S., & Cunningham, A. E. (2019) Preschool children’s early writing: Repeated measures reveal growing but variable trajectories. Reading and Writing, 32(4), 939-961.
• Clay, M. M. (1966) Emergent Reading Behaviour [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Auckland.
• Clay, M. M. (1975) What Did I Write? Beginning Writing Behaviour. Auckland: Heinemann.
• Clay, M. M. (2010) How Very Young Children Explore Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Dunsmuir, S., & Blatchford, P. (2004) Predictors of writing competence in 4- to 7-year-old children. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(3), 461-483.
• Dyson, A. H. (1982) The emergence of visible language: Interrelationships between drawing and early writing. Visible Language, 16(4), 360-381.
• Dyson, A. H. (1989) Multiple Worlds of Child Writers: Friends Learning to Write. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Feldgus, E. G., Cardonick, I., & Gentry, J. R. (2017) Kid Writing in the 21st Century. Hameray Publishing.
• Ferreiro, E., & Teberosky, A. (1982) Literacy Before Schooling. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.
• Guo, Y., Justice, L. M., Kaderavek, J. N., & McGinty, A. (2012) The literacy environment of preschool classrooms: Contributions to children’s emergent literacy growth. Journal of Research in Reading, 35(3), 308-327.
• Harmey, S. J., & Wilkinson, I. A. (2019). A critical review of the logics of inquiry in studies of early writing development. Journal of Writing Research, 11(1), 41-78.
• Kissel, B. (2009) Beyond the page: Peers influence pre-kindergarten writing through image, movement, and talk. Childhood Education, 85(3), 160-166.
• Mackenzie, N. (2011) From drawing to writing: What happens when you shift teaching priorities in the first six months of school? Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 34(3), 322-340.
• Mata, L. (2011) Motivation for reading and writing in kindergarten children. Reading Psychology, 32(3), 272-299.
• McCutchen, D. (1996) A capacity theory of writing: Working memory in composition. Educational Psychology Review, 8(3), 299-325.
• Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2008) Pathways to literacy: A study of invented spelling and its role in learning to read. Child Development, 79(4), 899-913.
• Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017) Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in Grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53(1), 77-88.
• Papadopoulos, I. (2026) Emergent writing in early childhood: Developmental patterns in drawing, scribbling, and letter-like forms. International Journal of Early Childhood, 1-18.
• Puranik, C. S., Petscher, Y., & Lonigan, C. J. (2013) Dimensionality and reliability of letter writing in 3- to 5-year-old preschool children. Learning and Individual Differences, 28, 133-141.
• Quinn, M. F., Gerde, H. K., & Bingham, G. E. (2022) Who, what, and where: Classroom contexts for preschool writing experiences. Early Education and Development, 33(8), 1439-1460.
• Read, C. (1971) Pre-school children’s knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Review, 41(1), 1-34.
• Rodríguez, C., Jiménez, J. E., & Balade, J. (2024) The impact of oral language and transcription skills on early writing production in kindergarteners: Productivity and quality. Early Childhood Education Journal.
• Rowe, D. W., & Neitzel, C. (2010) Interest and agency in 2- and 3-year-olds’ participation in emergent writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(2), 169-195.
• Santangelo, T., & Graham, S. (2016) A comprehensive meta-analysis of handwriting instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 28(2), 225-265.
• Schrodt, K., FitzPatrick, E., Lee, S., McKeown, D., McColloch, A., & Evert, K. (2024) The effects of invented spelling instruction on literacy achievement and writing motivation. Education Sciences, 14(9), 1020.
• Sénéchal, M., Ouellette, G., Pagan, S., & Lever, R. (2012) The role of invented spelling on learning to read in low-phoneme-awareness kindergartners: A randomized-control-trial study. Reading and Writing, 25(4), 917-934.
• Sulzby, E. (1985) Kindergartners as writers and readers. In M. Farr (Ed.) Advances in Writing Research, Vol. 1: Children’s Early Writing Development (pp. 127-199). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
• Sumner, E., Llauradó, A., Cordiner, J., Vettori, G., & Dockrell, J. E. (2026) Oral language and writing skills in the first years of formal education. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1-21.
• Teale, W. H., & Sulzby, E. (Eds.) (1986) Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
• Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2014) How Children Learn to Write Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wollman-Bonilla, J. E. (2001) Can first-grade writers demonstrate audience awareness? Reading Research Quarterly, 36(2), 184-201.
• Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2027) Handbook Of Writing Research For The Early Years. The Writing For Pleasure Centre.

What does the research actually say about teaching the youngest of children to write?

The Handbook Of Writing Research For The Early Years brings together evidence-informed CPD articles, detailed research summaries, myth-busting investigations and a carefully curated reading list into a single, practical resource for Nursery, Reception (and Primary) practitioners.

Inside, you’ll find the research behind some of early years writing’s most pernicious myths – and what the evidence really tells us:

• Do children need to learn their letters before they can write? 
• Should writing only happen through play, or only ever under adult supervision? 
• Is invented spelling a bad habit or a developmental milestone? 
• Should colouring pencils really be banned from the writing table?

Drawing on peer-reviewed research and organised around practical, classroom-ready takeaways, this handbook equips teachers to understand how writing first develops, why young children’s working memory changes everything about how writing should be taught, and how a sequential book-making approach can help even the youngest of authors write to the full potential.

Whether you’re building your subject knowledge from scratch or looking to evaluate your existing practice against the evidence, this handbook is designed to be read and put to work in your classroom on Monday morning.

Individual license – £10.95

School/Institution license – £54.75

or FREE for members

Early writing development researcher Isaak Papadopoulos has produced the following writing development rubric for early year teachers.

(Adapted from Papadopoulos, 2026)

The rubric illustrates a typical developmental pathway in children’s earliest writing. The visual examples are illustrative rather than prescriptive. Children’s development is rarely linear and they may demonstrate characteristics from several stages simultaneously.

A1. Control Of Marking Tools 

This dimension considers how intentionally children use drawing and writing tools.

• Stage 1: Marks are largely uncontrolled and exploratory. Children enjoy making movements with pens, pencils or crayons but their marks show little evidence of deliberate control.
• Stage 2: Children begin to gain control over their movements. You’ll notice that they intentionally make repeated shapes, lines or circles and are beginning to produce marks for a purpose/reason/audience.
• Stage 3: Marks are becoming increasingly deliberate and controlled. Children intentionally create simple drawings to communicate their ideas alongside their emergent writing.
• Stage 4: Children demonstrate confident control of writing tools. Their drawings and writing are purposeful, organised and used intentionally to represent their ideas.

A2. Representation Of Ideas 

This dimension focuses on whether children’s marks represent meaning.

• Stage 1: Marks do not appear to represent any identifiable objects or ideas.
• Stage 2: Some drawings or marks occasionally resemble familiar objects or ideas, although child explanation or adult interpretation will likely be needed.
• Stage 3: Children regularly create recognisable representations of people, objects and events.
• Stage 4: Drawings consistently communicate identifiable ideas and often include increasing detail.

A3. Language Use 

This dimension is related to the process of making their ‘writing’. It considers children’s use of their available languages during storytelling and composition.

• Stage 1: Children communicate primarily through gesture, expression or action rather than through spoken language.
• Stage 2: Children typically use one language while explaining or discussing their drawings and emergent writing.
• Stage 3: For multilingual children, you’ll notice that they might occasionally move between languages when explaining ideas or composing.
• Stage 4: Some children confidently and naturally draw upon their languages to express and develop their ideas.

A4. Communication Of Ideas

This dimension considers how effectively children communicate meaning through drawing, talk and early writing.

• Stage 1: The intended message is difficult to determine.
• Stage 2: Children communicate simple ideas but often require child explanation and adult questioning to fully make sense of it.
• Stage 3: The main message is usually clear and understandable.
• Stage 4: Children communicate coherent, detailed messages that others can understand independently.

A5. Engagement And Creativity

This dimension reflects children’s motivation to participate in writing and drawing activities.

• Stage 1: Children’s interest in mark making, drawing and book-making can be fleeting. 
• Stage 2: Interest and engagement is growing, with occasional creative experimentation.
• Stage 3: Children willingly engage in drawing and writing activities, often developing their own picturebooks (and other writings) in their own time.
• Stage 4: Children show sustained engagement, independence and creativity.

B1. Formation Of Shapes

This dimension considers the development of increasingly conventional graphic forms in children’s book-making.

• Stage 1: Children produce random marks or shapes that do not resemble letters.
• Stage 2: Occasionally, some shapes may begin to resemble letters.
• Stage 3: Children produce a mixture of letter-like shapes and fully conventional letters.
• Stage 4: Letter formation is recognisable.

B2. Recognition Of Scripts

This dimension considers children’s awareness of different writing systems.

• Stage 1: Children do not distinguish between different scripts.
• Stage 2: Children begin recognising one writing system and attempt to reproduce some of its features.
• Stage 3: Children, particularly your multilingual writers, recognise that different languages use different scripts and begin distinguishing between them.
• Stage 4: Children who are multilingual appropriately select and use the correct script for each language. Sometimes they’ll combine different scripts together.

B3. Language Integration

This dimension reflects how children draw upon their linguistic resources while composing.

• Stage 1: Languages remain separate or are not yet used during writing.
• Stage 2: For multilingual children, one language predominates during storytelling and writing.
• Stage 3: Children occasionally combine their languages while developing ideas.
• Stage 4: Children flexibly integrate their languages according to their purpose and audience.

B4. Representation Of Sound 

This dimension considers children’s growing understanding of the relationship between sound and print.

• Stage 1: Their marks do not represent the sounds of spoken language.
• Stage 2: Children begin using individual letters or letter-like shapes to represent some of the sounds they know. They will use lines or scribbles for the sounds they don’t yet know (also called ‘kid writing’.
• Stage 3: Many sounds within words are represented, often using plausible phonetic spellings. For example, the opening and last sound in a word. They will continue to use ‘kid writing’ for the sounds they don’t yet know.
• Stage 4: Children consistently represent most sounds in words, with their spellings being plausible and increasingly conventional.

Final thoughts

These stages describe a continuum of development, not a checklist. Children may:

• Demonstrate characteristics from different stages at the same time.
• Progress more rapidly in some dimensions than others.
• Move forwards and backwards depending on context, task or language.
• Show different profiles across drawing, oral language and writing.

The visual exemplars are intended to support professional judgement by providing typical examples of children’s emerging writing behaviours. They should be interpreted alongside children’s talk, intentions and explanations, recognising that meaning often develops through the interaction between drawing, oral language and writing rather than through written marks alone.

Finally, for guidance, we’d typically expect:

• Pre-nursery: Most children will show evidence of Stage 1-2. A few may go beyond this.
• Nursery: Most children will show evidence of Stage 1-2. Some may go beyond this.
• Reception: While some children will be at Stage 1, most children will show evidence of Stage 2-3. Some will be at Stage 4.
• Year One: Most children should be at Stage 4. However, there will be some children showing evidence of being anywhere between Stage 1-4.

References and recommended further reading

• Papadopoulos, I. (2026). Emergent Writing in Early Childhood: Developmental Patterns in Drawing, Scribbling, and Letter-Like Forms. International Journal of Early Childhood, 1-18. [LINK]
• Byington, T. A., & Kim, Y. (2017). Promoting preschoolers’ emergent writing. YC Young Children, 72(5), 74-82. [LINK]
• Young, R. (2026) Debunking edu-myths: Children should only write words they can spell [LINK]

In many primary classrooms, children are routinely asked to sit down and write: to think of an idea, turn it into a series of sentences and transcribe those sentences accurately and legibly, all in one uninterrupted act. This is what writing researchers call parallel processing [LINK]. The simultaneous activation of all the different production strategies involved in writing at once. For skilled adult writers, this is possible because many of those production strategies have become fluent for us through the years. For younger writers, whose transcription is still effortful, and whose writing experiences are still limited, it is not. Asking young children to write this way does not ‘stretch them’ towards a higher standard. It just caps the standard they can reach.

Understanding what to do instead is the subject of this article.

⚠️ Why parallel processing is the wrong starting point for young writers

To understand why parallel processing is developmentally inappropriate for young writers, we first need to understand what writing actually requires the brain to do.

Drawing on the work of Graham, Olive and others (see LINK), we might suggest that writing involves three distinct levels of mental processing which trickle down into each other.

1. Conceptual processing. This is where writing ideas are born! This is where writers decide what they want to say, who they want to say it to, and retrieve relevant content knowledge from their memory, before shaping their thinking into some kind of plan.

This then informs their:

2. Linguistic processing. This is where sentences take shape. This is where the brain converts their plan into words and sentences. This includes selecting the right words, building syntactic structures, and working out the spelling of the words they wish to write down.

This then informs their:

3. Motor processing. This is where the sentences are transcribed onto the page.

Once the words are on the page, this can inform further conceptualisation or reconceptualising.

All three levels of processing draw on the same shared cognitive resource: working memory. Our brain’s limited and temporary workspace (LINK). In parallel processing, all three levels are being activated simultaneously. The writer is thinking about what to say, constructing the language to say it, and physically producing it on the page, all at the same moment. For young writers, all this simultaneous processing will invariably overload their working memory, causing hardship for children and heartache for teachers!

For young writers, transcribing can be extremely effortful, slow and attention-consuming. It has not yet been automated through sufficient instruction and practice. This means that the motor level of processing places enormous demands on working memory. These demands leave very little capacity available for the conceptual and linguistic work of composition.

The result? When we ask young children to write in parallel, the result is usually pretty predictable: ideas become impoverished, sentences simplified, word choices narrowed and texts become less ambitious than the child’s actual thinking and creativity. The child may transcribe some words onto the page but those words will not reflect what the child is capable of thinking, imagining, or saying. We think that’s a shame.

This is the cost of asking young writers to undertake parallel processing.

✅ Why a sequential process is more developmentally appropriate

If parallel processing overtaxes young writers, what should we be doing instead? The answer is sequential processing. This is where we ask children to handle the different levels of writing one at a time, in order, rather than all at once. The diagram below shows the difference.

In sequential processing, the young writer handles the conceptual work first: generating ideas, deciding what to say and creating a plan. Then they handle the linguistic work of constructing sentences. Then, and only then, do they turn to transcription: the motor work of getting those sentences onto the page. Each level of processing receives the child’s full cognitive attention in turn, rather than having to compete with the others.

When children are free to do their compositional thinking before picking up their pen, that thinking can be as ambitious, detailed and imaginative as the child is capable of. There is no handwriting pressure narrowing their ideas or needing to simplify their language. When they then turn to transcription, their working memory can devote itself almost entirely to the motor demands of transcribing, because the compositional decisions have already been made and put down on paper via drawings or a plan. Every part of the process is given the cognitive time and space it needs. Every part is therefore able to operate at a higher level.

📚 Our book-making approach: The perfect scaffold for the sequential process

Knowing that sequential processing is developmentally appropriate is one thing. Building it systematically into classroom practice is another. Our book-making approach offers a complete, structured framework for doing exactly this. One that maps directly onto the three levels of processing and gives each one the dedicated cognitive space it needs.

Our book-making approach works through a deliberate four-stage sequence, each stage preparing the ground for the one that follows.

STAGE ONE: ‘Idea parties’ and making front covers

Once a book-making project has been introduced, children generate their ideas for the project through talk and by having an ‘ideas party’. The teacher facilitates these discussions in which children decide what their books will be about: the characters, the events, the information they want to share and the overall shape of their story or information text. This is high-level conceptual work. You’re setting the communicative purpose and establishing the audience for the books. This is composition at its most expansive, unencumbered by any transcriptional demand whatsoever. Lovely.

Once children have settled on their book idea, they make their front covers. They choose a title and draw a front cover. This is not a decorative activity! It is planning. The child declares, in a form that is visible, what their book is about and what kind of writer they are being. The conceptual framework of the book is being established. The child knows their subject. Their working memory can now begin to establish their plan…

STAGE TWO: Drawing their ideas on each page

With the big idea settled, and the front cover made, children move through their book page by page, drawing what will happen or what will be discussed on each. By the time this stage is complete, the child has produced a complete, sequenced and visual compositional plan.

The cognitive significance of this is substantial. Drawing externalises the child’s conceptual thinking, taking it out of working memory and placing it on the page in a visible form (LINK). Ideas that would otherwise need to be held in working memory are now safely on the page. The children can look at them, point to them and return to them at any point. Their mental desk has been cleared of this conceptual load.

This means that everything that follows, oral rehearsal and transcription, can proceed without the child simultaneously trying to remember what they wanted to write about. The drawing at the top of the page holds the answer. Working memory is free for the work that comes next…

STAGE THREE: Oral rehearsal

With their drawings in front of them, children spend time developing the sentences for their pages. First, they do this at the text level. ‘Telling’ the whole of their story or information book. 

Next, pointing to a drawing, they construct and rehearse the sentence(s) they will write on that particular page, trying out different word choices and adjusting the structure through feedback before any transcription begins.

Because the conceptual content is already secured on the page, the child can see exactly what they want to say. Oral rehearsal can then focus almost entirely on the linguistic level of processing: how to say it. The teacher can push for precise word choices, more sophisticated sentence structures, and well-chosen connecting language because neither child nor teacher is spending cognitive energy recovering or establishing the underlying writing idea. Their drawing does this heavy lifting..

When oral rehearsal follows drawing, the sequential cycle becomes: draw it, say it, then write it. The child arrives at transcription with two resolved resources already in place (the visual plan and the rehearsed language) and so working memory is free to concentrate on the motor demands of handwriting.

STAGE FOUR: Transcription

When the child picks up their pen, every major compositional decision has already been made. Transcription arrives with a single job: to encode familiar, already-owned language into written form.

The result is consistently striking to teachers who first use this approach. The ideas are strong (because they were developed without any transcriptional pressure). The language is rich (because it was crafted without the motor demands of handwriting). And the transcription itself, freed from the burden of carrying the entire writing process alone, is more fluent, more confident, and more accurate than it would otherwise be.

Teachers can also decide the transcriptional demand of this final stage to match each child’s current level of handwriting automaticity. 

At the simplest level, children write a single word, phrase or sentence per page. As children’s confidence and automaticity grow, they tend to write two sentences per page, then a short paragraph. In each case, the compositional foundation remains the same. It’s only the transcriptional load that changes.

The examples below show how we can adjust our transcription expectations as children’s writing fluency develops (in earnest). As children’s fluency increases, we can increase the amount of thinking they are to transcribe in one sitting.

LEVEL ONE (Nursery – Reception): A mixture of emergent writing, single words or short phrases on each page

At Nursery and at the start of Reception, most children will use emergent writing or kid writing, as a temporary scaffold, to create their texts. However, once phonics, handwriting and spelling instruction is introduced, they’ll transition quickly onto writing single words or short phrases. 

LEVEL TWO (Reception – Year One): A single sentence per page

At level two, a child can be expected to commit to a single sentence to each page of their picturebook (sometimes they’ll just be having such a great day they’ll want to do more). The cognitive demand of transcription is kept low so that a child who is still building their handwriting and spelling automaticity can create a whole text and feel the success and satisfaction that comes with that. 

Our expectation is that children in Reception/Year One would learn to craft books like this. By the way, for children new to English, LEVEL ONE or LEVEL TWO is a really great place to start (LINK)

LEVEL THREE (Year One – Year Two): Multiple sentences per page

This is a small step up in transcriptional load. When children are ready, they can be asked to transcribe more of the content they have already settled on through their talk, drawing and oral rehearsals. Often, you’ll know that they’re ready because, despite asking only for a single sentence, they’ll ignore you and want to write multiple sentences on each page anyway! We find this is typical in year one and into year two. 

LEVEL FOUR (Year Two – Year Three Onwards): A paragraph per page

At LEVEL FOUR, each page becomes a short paragraph of three or four sentences. This is a substantial increase in transcriptional output. Critically, though, the approach remains reassuringly consistent. The expectation is that children draft a page a day. 

Seen side by side, the four levels make the composition-first argument visible. What changes is the transcriptional demand the teacher asks the child to manage in a single sitting. A teacher can move a class, a group, or an individual child between these levels at any time. Adaptive teaching becomes a matter of adjusting children’s transcriptional load, not redesigning the entire writing task!

📈 Building children towards parallel processing over time

The book-making approach as described above is an explicit, carefully scaffolded version of sequential processing. The compositional work is complete before transcription begins. This is the perfect place for young or inexperienced writers to start.

But sequential processing is not the destination. Over time, as children become more experienced, the goal is for them to move towards the more parallel, fluent processing of skilled writers. The book-making approach supports this developmental journey naturally because the demands it places on children can be increased incrementally in line with their growing capacities.

There are several ways in which we can begin to increase those demands:

1. Increase the length of transcriptional bursts. As children move from one sentence per page to two sentences to a paragraph, they are sustaining their handwriting for longer while holding more language in mind. A step towards the more extended transcription periods of parallel writers.

2. Condensing the oral rehearsal stage. As children become more experienced, you can gradually reduce the amount of explicit oral rehearsal scaffolding, inviting children to move more fluidly between their drawings and their writing. They will begin to integrate the linguistic and motor stages more closely.

3. Encouraging anticipatory thinking and spontaneity during transcription. More experienced writers may find that, as they transcribe one page, they are already beginning to think about the language for the next. This is the earliest sign of parallel processing. You will also notice that they begin to change their mind half way through transcribing a page or else want to return to previous pages to revise them and make them better. They also feel a need to adjust their illustrations so that they better reflect what they have finally written. This is all good stuff!

4. Encourage children to develop their own favoured writing process through personal writing projects. Give children access to blank picture and chapter books as well as writing journals so that they can begin to develop their own writing process away from the demands of official class writing projects [LINK].

✍️ The importance of specific handwriting and spelling instruction

Book-making sessions work best when they sit alongside regular, explicit and well-taught handwriting and spelling lessons. These lessons need to be timetabled in their own right [LINK]. Handwriting and spelling require their own short, regular, explicit sessions, separate from book-making time, where letter formation, spelling patterns, and orthographic knowledge can be taught directly and practised deliberately. Importantly, what children learn in these sessions does not stay contained within them. Instead, they use and apply all that rich learning straight into their books. Seen this way, these two kinds of lessons are feeding the same outcome from two directions.

1. Explicit transcription teaching builds the automaticity and fluency that book-making sessions depend on.
2. Book-making sessions give the real and motivating context in which children actually want to improve their transcriptional skills!

Key takeaways for the classroom

1. Recognise that asking young writers to use parallel processing is developmentally inappropriate. When handwriting is not yet automatic, the motor demands of transcription consume most of a child’s available working memory, leaving little capacity for the concurrent demands of idea generation and language construction.

2. Understand that sequential processing is a developmentally appropriate approach for young writers. Handling the compositional work before the transcriptional work (one level of processing at a time) allows each level to be done to the highest quality.

3. Use the book-making approach to scaffold the sequential process explicitly. Oral idea generation and front cover making settle the big conceptual picture. Page-by-page drawings externalises the whole composition before any language work begins. Oral rehearsal establishes the language for each page. Transcription then handles only the motor work of encoding. Each stage prepares the ground for the next.

4. Take drawing seriously as a cognitive tool. When children draw their book page by page before writing, they remove their conceptual content from working memory, placing it on the page in a stable, visible form that supports every subsequent stage. In our view, this is the single most powerful reduction in cognitive load available to a young writer.

5. Align transcriptional demands to each child’s current stage of handwriting and encoding automaticity. One sentence per page, two sentences per page, or a paragraph per page, our book-making approach allows teachers to increase transcriptional demand incrementally.

6. Increase demands gradually, when children are ready. As handwriting automatises, children can sustain longer writing bursts, require less oral rehearsal and can begin to think ahead during transcription. These are signs of emerging parallel processing. Introduce more demanding versions of book-making in response to these signs.
7. Teach handwriting with automaticity as the goal. Daily handwriting instruction and practice that focuses on speed, ease and accuracy progressively releases working memory for parallel processing.

How our book-making approach frees up working memory, enabling children to write with confidence by developing and organising their ideas before they have to manage transcription.

Watch any young writer sit down to transcribe a sentence and you can often see the strain. They are trying to remember what they want to say, find the words to express it, hold the sounds in their mind, and form their letters correctly, all at the same time.

This happens when schools, schemes, teachers or even so-called experts or consultants insist on asking children to deal with composition and transcription at the same time. The science of writing has, for a long time, understood that writing is not one skill but several, working together under the limits of a child’s working memory (LINK). When all of these demands land on a child simultaneously, something has to give, and it is usually the quality and ambition of the writing itself.

Our book-making pedagogy offers a more developmentally appropriate approach. Rather than asking children to generate ideas, plan, translate and transcribe all at once, we separate out these demands and sequence them carefully. Composition comes first. Transcription follows. The result is a more rigorous and systematic writing instruction. It is writing instruction that respects how much a young writer can actually hold in their mind at once.

Settling the thinking before the transcribing begins

Through our book-making approach, children spend real time on composition before they are asked to transcribe a single word. They generate ideas through ‘Idea Parties’ and use talk and drawings to decide what their book will be about. They then sequence their ideas onto the pages of their book by putting an illustration on each page. They then use these illustrations to orally rehearse the sentence(s) they want to transcribe to paper.

By the time a child picks up their pencil, the composing element is largely done. They are now in a position to focus on transcribing their ideas to paper. By settling their compositions first, book-making removes the competition in working memory.

For young writers, drawing and talking supports the compositional work of writing.

Drawing functions as an early and genuine form of text construction. When children draw, they take their ideas out of their minds and organise them onto paper, freeing up their working memory (LINK). Their illustrations become a stable reference point that they can return to and orally rehearse. They no longer need to hold this information in their mind. Freeing them up to focus on transcription. 

Oral rehearsal does similar work at the sentence-level. Children build their sentence(s) aloud before they write them, and can adjust its structure and meaning through teacher and peer feedback (LINK). When it’s time to transcribe, the sentence already exists. They are not searching for content and a sentence structure at the same moment. Working memory is free to focus on transcription.

How our book-making approach develops through the year groups

The examples below show how we can adjust our transcription expectations as children’s writing fluency develops (in earnest). As children’s fluency increases, we can increase the amount of thinking they are to transcribe in one sitting.

LEVEL ONE (Nursery – Reception): A mixture of emergent writing, single words or short phrases on each page

At Nursery and at the start of Reception, most children will use emergent writing or kid writing, as a temporary scaffold, to create their texts. However, once phonics, handwriting and spelling instruction is introduced, they’ll transition quickly onto writing single words or short phrases. 

LEVEL TWO (Reception – Year One): A single sentence per page

At level two, a child can be expected to commit to a single sentence to each page of their picturebook (sometimes they’ll just be having such a great day they’ll want to do more). The cognitive demand of transcription is kept low so that a child who is still building their handwriting and spelling automaticity can create a whole text and feel the success and satisfaction that comes with that. 

Our expectation is that children in Reception/Year One would learn to craft books like this. By the way, for children new to English, LEVEL ONE or LEVEL TWO is a really great place to start (LINK)

LEVEL THREE (Year One – Year Two): Multiple sentences per page

This is a small step up in transcriptional load. When children are ready, they can be asked to transcribe more of the content they have already settled on through their talk, drawing and oral rehearsals. Often, you’ll know that they’re ready because, despite asking only for a single sentence, they’ll ignore you and want to write multiple sentences on each page anyway! We find this is typical in year one and into year two. 

LEVEL FOUR (Year Two – Year Three Onwards): A paragraph per page

At LEVEL FOUR, each page becomes a short paragraph of three or four sentences. This is a substantial increase in transcriptional output. Critically, though, the approach remains reassuringly consistent. The expectation is that children draft a page a day. 

Seen side by side, the four levels make the composition-first argument visible. What changes is the transcriptional demand the teacher asks the child to manage in a single sitting. A teacher can move a class, a group, or an individual child between these levels at any time. Adaptive teaching becomes a matter of adjusting children’s transcriptional load, not redesigning the entire writing task!

Transcription becomes a manageable task

Book-making treats transcription as the final stage, made easier by everything that’s come before it.

Once children’s compositions are settled, children’s attention can go towards forming letters, encoding words and using punctuation (LINK). 

This is still demanding work! But children are no longer being asked to simultaneously invent content, plan it all in their mind and then transcribe it to paper in one sitting. Our approach creates room for transcription and composition to improve. We see transcriptional fluency increase, feelings of pride and success increase, and final outcomes become longer and more controlled. This is because transcription is no longer competing with composition for the same limited attention.

This is at the heart of the book-making approach. Strong transcription is not the precondition for good composition. It is something composition-first teaching makes possible.

Book-making should not replace explicit transcription teaching.

Book-making sessions work best when they sit alongside regular, explicit and well-taught handwriting and spelling lessons. These lessons need to be timetabled in their own right [LINK].

Handwriting and spelling require their own short, regular, explicit sessions, separate from book-making time, where letter formation, spelling patterns, and orthographic knowledge can be taught directly and practised deliberately. Importantly, what children learn in these sessions does not stay contained within them. Instead, they use and apply all that rich learning straight into their books.

Seen this way, these two kinds of lessons are feeding the same outcome from two directions. 

1. Explicit transcription teaching builds the automaticity and fluency that book-making sessions depend on.
2. Book-making sessions give the real and motivating context in which children actually want to improve their transcriptional skills!

Writing for a reason changes how children behave as writers

Importantly, book-making doesn’t produce isolated sentences. It produces short but complete texts. Books that can be told, read, shared, revisited and enjoyed by others. That sense of audience and purpose changes how children engage with writing. 

Studies of authenticity in children’s writing find that pupils consistently prefer, and invest more effort in, writing that serves a genuine communicative purpose for a real audience beyond the classroom. We know that they pay more attention, put in more effort, persist for longer, show greater enthusiasm, seek support from others rather than give up, write more independently and are less likely to allow themselves to be distracted (LINK, LINK)

They care about whether their meaning comes across. They also start to see themselves as authors, with control over different kinds of texts, rather than as pupils completing an exercise. Writer identity, understood as a pupil’s sense of themselves as someone who is a genuine writer, is also associated with stronger engagement, positive dispositions towards writing and exceptional academic progress (LINK). 

This approach isn’t just practice. It is publication. That distinction matters to how seriously children take their own writing.

What this looks like for the teacher

None of this happens by accident. Teachers model how to make a book, from the initial idea to the illustrations. They demonstrate oral rehearsal of sentences, guide children to sequence their pages, and support them as they refine and orally rehearse what they want to transcribe to paper.

This level of quality instruction is what allows children to enter the transcribing stage with confidence rather than uncertainty.

Top tips:

• In addition to book-making sessions, deliver short, regular, explicit handwriting and spelling lessons. These should be timetabled in their own right [LINK].
• Before transcribing, children should talk, draw and orally rehearse their ideas [LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK and LINK].
• Children should be asked to transcribe at whatever level of sentence demand is most appropriate.
• After transcribing, children should ‘tell’ or otherwise read back their writing to their teacher or friends. This way, they can check if their meaning was clear and well understood.

To end

By settling composition first, through talk, drawing, and oral rehearsal, you ensure that when children turn their attention to transcription, they are writing language they already own rather than trying to invent and write it at the same time.

It’s this ordering that allows young writers to produce manuscripts that are longer, more controlled, more successful and more genuinely their own. It’s also an awful lot of fun!

“Hi Ross and Phil. We recently received some training where it was recommended that in the EYFS we should only focus on teaching handwriting to ‘mastery’. We shouldn’t look to teach composition until children have mastered handwriting. This doesn’t feel right to us. Can you help?”

The myth

Children should master handwriting before anything else. Teachers should focus exclusively on developing speed and automaticity in letter formation and composition should wait until transcription is secured. Until a child can form letters quickly and correctly, the argument goes, they aren’t really ready to be a writer yet [LINK and LINK].

Why the myth persists

This myth survives because it does actually have a genuine finding at its core. 

As our own Writing Development Map shows, handwriting fluency is reliably associated with the quality and quantity of children’s writing 

Children who find letter formation effortful spend more of their limited working memory on these lower-level, mechanical processes, leaving fewer cognitive resources for the higher-order work of composition.

Where the myth goes wrong is in the next step: treating a correlation between handwriting fluency and writing quality as a prescription for sequencing: handwriting first, fast and only, then composing. Showing that handwriting contributes to writing quality is not the same as saying it must be mastered in isolation before composition can begin!🤦🏻‍♂️

What the research actually shows

Writing development is interactive, not hierarchical. Again, as our Writing Development Map shows, transcription, text generation and executive control operate simultaneously during writing, not as a sequence of discrete stages a writer must complete in order. Berninger & Winn (2006) make a similar case: handwriting, spelling and text generation develop reciprocally, each shaping the other as a child grows as a writer. More recent models, including Kim’s (2022) model of writing continues this understanding. Transcription and composition are interacting components of one developing system, not separate stages.

New empirical evidence sharpens this point considerably. Kreutz et al. (2026) identified what they call a ‘double dissociation’ between transcription skills and text quality. In plain terms: around 12% of students produced high-quality texts despite having deficient handwriting fluency or spelling. 12% of pupils showed the reverse, producing poor-quality texts despite having perfectly good transcription skills.

Composition supports transcription development

Genuine, purposeful writing gives children repeated opportunities to retrieve and apply their letter formation and spelling knowledge in context. A whole variety of studies have found meaningful links running in both directions between transcriptional fluency and composing (LINK). Treating handwriting as something to be perfected in isolation, before children are allowed to compose, removes one of the best contexts that helps handwriting develop in the first place.

If working memory capacity is the concern, exclusion isn’t the answer, scaffolding is.

McCutchen’s (1996) capacity theory of writing is often cited (wrongly) to argue that children’s limited working memory can’t cope with transcription and composition at once. But this research points towards scaffolding, not exclusion. For example, inviting children to use ‘kid writing’ as a temporary scaffold while they continue to develop their transcriptional skills (in earnest). 

This scaffold exists precisely because researchers have taken the capacity problem seriously and concluded that supporting children’s access to composition, not postponing it, is the right response.

Young children are already composers

Long before their handwriting is fluent, young children are capable of real composition. Through their own independent attempts, they engage in authentic meaning-making well ahead of transcriptional mastery (LINK).

Research evidence into emergent writing is unambiguous on this point. Classroom research shows the youngest of writers can naturally weave together drawing, talking and writing as they make meaning. Composing is already well underway before they even start formal schooling (LINK). 

For example, Rowe’s (2018) review of early writing research shows that children’s compositional intent (their drive to communicate something specific) is observable far earlier than their transcriptional control and that early-years pedagogy has historically undersold what young children are capable of!

Delaying composition until handwriting is automatic risks denying children, for months or even years, the chance to develop as authors with something to say.

The cost of getting it wrong

Sequencing instruction this way teaches children something about what kind of writer they’re allowed to be (LINK).

Writing motivation depends on children experiencing genuine autonomy and competence in what they’re doing. A child whose early writing instruction consists only of copying letters is being told, in effect, that composing (having something to say and getting to say it) isn’t yet their job. As a result, children can often feel as though they are being asked to prepare for something that never actually comes…

Graham’s (2018) writer(s)-within-community model goes further, framing writing development as something that happens through genuine participation in writing communities. Children become writers by doing the social, communicative work of writing, not by rehearsing its mechanics in isolation. Strip composition out of the early curriculum for long enough and you risk manufacturing precisely the kind of disengagement the National Literacy Trust’s 2026 report describes in its profiles of ambivalent and averse writers: children who come to the experience writing as a technical chore rather than something they do for their own purposes.

What should schools do?

Fortunately, the research doesn’t force a choice between handwriting and composition. Effective practice attends to both, simultaneously, from the start:

• Teach handwriting explicitly and systematically from Reception onwards [LINK].
• Prioritise accurate, increasingly automatic letter formation.
• Teach encoding/spelling lessons not just handwriting lessons [LINK].
• Provide daily, genuine opportunities for composition from the earliest years [LINK].
• Use emergent writing, kid writing and informed spelling as temporary scaffolds to support children whose transcription is still being developed (in earnest) [LINK].
• Gradually increase compositional demands as transcription becomes more automatic, rather than withholding it completely [LINK].

The bottom line

Research strongly supports the explicit teaching of handwriting. Research strongly supports the teaching of composition from a child’s earliest encounters with writing. What the research does not support is teaching handwriting first, fast and only.

Handwriting and composition develop reciprocally: children become more fluent handwriters partly through composing, and they become more capable composers as their handwriting develops. 

Teaching children to write means teaching them to be writers not scribers…

References and further reading

• Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham, S., & Richards, T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(1), 39–56.
• Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Jones, J., Wolf, B. J., Gould, L., Anderson-Youngstrom, M., Shimada, S., & Apel, K. (2006). Early development of language by hand: Composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections, three letter-writing modes, and fast mapping in spelling. Developmental Neuropsychology, 29(1), 61–92.
• Berninger, V. W., Vaughan, K., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Rogan, L. W., Brooks, A., Reed, E., & Graham, S. (1997). Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers: Transfer from handwriting to composition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(4), 652–666.
• Berninger, V. W., & Winn, W. D. (2006). Implications of advancements in brain research and technology for writing development, writing instruction, and educational evolution. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of Writing Research (pp. 96–114). Guilford Press.
• Bissex, G. L. (1980). GNYS AT WRK: A child learns to write and read. Harvard University Press.
• Bonafede, A., & Clark, C. (2026). Why children and young people do or do not engage with writing in their free time: Towards a multidimensional model of writing engagement. National Literacy Trust.
• Cabell, S. Q., Neuman, S. B., & Terry, N. P. (2023). Handbook on the science of early literacy. Guilford Press
• Clay, M. M. (1975). What Did I Write? Heinemann.
• Clay, M. (1987). Writing Begins at Home: Preparing Children for Writing before They Go to School. Heinemann.
• Clay, M. M. (2010). How very young children explore writing. Heinemann.
• Dyson, A. H. (1989). Multiple Worlds of Child Writers. Teachers College Press.
• Dyson, A. H. (1993). Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School. Teachers College Press.
• Feldgus, E. G., Cardonick, I., & Gentry, J. R. (2017). Kid Writing: A Systematic Approach to Phonics, Journals, and Writing Workshop. Wright Group/McGraw-Hill.
• Graham, S. (2018). A revised writer(s)-within-community model of writing. Educational Psychologist, 53(4), 258–279.
• Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Fink, B. (2000). Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(4), 620–633.
• Håland, A., Hoem, T. F., & McTigue, E. M. (2019). Writing in first grade: The quantity and quality of practices in Norwegian classrooms. Early childhood education journal, 47(1), 63-74.
• Hayes, J. R. (1996). A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In C. M. Levy & S. Ransdell (Eds.), The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences, and Applications (pp. 1–27). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Kim, Y. S. G., & Graham, S. (2022). Expanding the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Writing (DIEW): Reading–writing relations, and dynamic relations as a function of measurement/dimensions of written composition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(2), 215.
• Kreutz, R. M., Philippek, J., Hennes, A. K., & Schabmann, A. (2026). Good text quality despite deficient transcription skills: An analysis of double dissociation. Journal of Writing Research.
• Mackenzie, N. M., & Scull, J. (2024). Understanding and supporting young writers from birth to 8. Taylor & Francis.
• McCutchen, D. (1996). A capacity theory of writing: Working memory in composition. Educational Psychology Review, 8(3), 299–325.
• Medwell, J., & Wray, D. (2007). Handwriting: What do we know and what do we need to know? Literacy, 41(1), 10–16.
• Medwell, J., Strand, S., & Wray, D. (2007). The role of handwriting in composing for Y2 children. Literacy, 41(1), 18–36.
• Medwell, J., Strand, S., & Wray, D. (2009). The links between handwriting and composing for Y6 children. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(3), 329–344.
• Quinn, M. F., & Rohloff, R. (2025). Understanding young children’s composition across three key components: Transcription, connection, and discourse. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 39(1), 42-60.
• Quinn, M. F., Zhang, X. Y., Rohloff, R., & Ridley, J. (2026). Understanding preschool writing: task adherence as a window into composing development. Reading and Writing, 1-23.
• Ray, K. W., & Glover, M. (2008). Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten. Heinemann.
• Rowe, D. W. (2018). The unrealized promise of emergent writing: Reimagining the way forward for early writing instruction. Language Arts, 95(4), 229–241.
• Santangelo, T., & Graham, S. (2016). A comprehensive meta-analysis of handwriting instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 225–265.
• Schickedanz, J. A. (1990). Adam’s righting revolutions: One child’s literacy development from infancy through grade one. Heinemann Educational Publishers.

There is a moment that happens in many Nursery and Reception classrooms that looks, on the surface, quite simple: you sit down and you write. You pick up a pen and the children watch with curiosity, anticipation and intrigue.

What is happening in that moment is far from simple.

When you write and make picturebooks in front of your children (daily and with genuine pleasure), they are receiving one of the richest educational experiences available to them. As they watch and listen, across dozens of domains of knowledge, understanding, skill, and disposition, they are learning an extraordinary amount.

This article sets out the full scope of what that learning looks like. It helps us see just how much is made available to children when we choose to write in front of our classes. The categories that follow make the case that daily writing lessons are not a nice extra. They are one of the most powerful pedagogical acts in the early years classroom.

As you read through it, you may find yourself thinking: I just didn’t know I was teaching them all of that!

✏️ Writing behaviours and habits

When children gather together to watch you write daily, they absorb a model of what being a writer is all about. This ‘writing business’ is something that people who come to Nursery/Reception do for pleasure. Children will begin to understand the routines and rituals of a writing life.

• Writers write daily.
• Writing and making books is enjoyable.
• Writing and making books takes time.
• Writers return to unfinished books.
• Writers can write in short sessions.
• Writing is often a process, not always a single event.
• Writers develop routines, habits and rituals.
• Writers have book ideas inside them.
• Writers notice things worth making books about.
• Writers choose to write even when they are unsure.
• Writers keep going when writing gets difficult.
• Writers make mistakes.
• Writers change their minds.
• Writers revise their pictures and their writing.
• Writers proof-read.
• Writers reread what they’ve written.
• Writers seek feedback and reactions from their friends and family.
• Writers get better by learning from other writers and through practice.
• Writers celebrate their published books.

🧑‍🎨 Writer identity

Perhaps the most transformative learning children can take from watching their teacher write is the understanding that they can be writers too. Writer-identity is caught, not taught. A teacher who genuinely inhabits a writer’s identity in front of their class each day gives children permission to be writers too.

• Adults are writers and book makers.
• Teachers are writers and book makers (my teacher was once a child who made books)
• Children are writers and book makers!
• Anyone can make story books and information books.
• Story books belong to everyone.
• Their own ideas matter.
• Their experiences and their funds of knowledge are worth turning into books.
• Their voices and creative ideas have value and can bring people immense pleasure.
• Writing and book making is a great way to express yourself.

💡 Generating ideas

One of the most exciting aspects of writing with young children is where their ideas come from. Watching their teacher wonder aloud, make connections and gather material from their world demystifies the creative process for young children.

• Stories come from your imagination.
• Stories come from your memories.
• Stories come from conversations with friends.
• Stories come from playing.
• Everyday experiences are worth writing down.
• Writers collect ideas.
• Writers observe closely.
• Writers wonder about things.
• Writers ask questions.
• Writers want to teach people about the things they care about most.
• Writers want to entertain people.
• Writers adapt their favourite stories.
• Writers experiment and try things out.
• Not every idea becomes a great book.
• Writers revisit ideas time and time again.

📋 Planning

Planning is invisible in finished books. When a teacher makes their planning visible (for example, drawing a rough sequence of illustrations in their picturebook), children begin to understand that writing is shaped by thinking and drawing.

• Writers think before writing.
• Writers draw and plan in different ways.
• Planning can involve acting things out.
• Planning can involve talking with pals.
• Plans can change.
• Writers think about sequence.
• Writers think about what comes first.
• Writers think about what comes next.
• Writers think about their endings.
• Writers think about their readers.

🗣️ Language development

When a teacher says a word, phrase or sentence aloud before writing it down, children are receiving a live demonstration of the relationship between spoken and written language. This is some of the most direct language teaching available in the early years.

• Talking can support your writing.
• Writers say words, phrases and sentences aloud before they write them down.
• Writers talk through their ideas with their friends before committing them to paper.
• Writers choose words carefully.
• Different words create different reactions in your readers.
• Writers use descriptive language.
• Writers use precise language.
• Writers use repetition.
• Writers use rhythm.
• Writers use sound patterns.
• Writers use humour.
• Writers create suspense.
• Writers use dialogue.
• Writers use questions.
• Writers use exclamations.
• Language can create emotions in your reader.

📖 Concepts about print

To help children read and write, they need to develop an understanding of how print works. A teacher who writes their own books in front of their class provides repeated, meaningful exposure to all of these print concepts in context.

• Print carries meaning.
• Words are separate units of meaning.
• Sentences are made of words.
• Text has directionality. English print runs left to right. Print runs top to bottom.
• Spaces separate words.
• Pages are turned in sequence to reveal something new to the reader.
• Books have beginnings and endings.
• Print can appear in many forms.
• Text can be large or small.
• Text and pictures work together.
• Titles have special purposes.
• Authors’ names appear on their books.
• Books have covers that reveal things about them.
• Books have numbered pages.

🔤 Letter knowledge

When a teacher writes by hand in front of children, the formation of individual letters becomes observable. Children see letters take shape in real time (their sounds, their names, their variations) and can begin to build the mental representations that will support their own conventional writing.

• Letters have shapes.
• Letters have sounds.
• Letters have names.
• Uppercase and lowercase forms exist.
• Letters appear in patterns.
• Some letters occur more often.
• Letters combine to make words.
• Letter formation requires concentration and practice. If you do it a lot, you don’t have to even think about it.

🏃 Gross and fine motor development

Writing and book making are physical activities as well as cognitive ones. When children watch their teacher write and draw, they begin to understand how their bodies support literacy. Over time, they develop more and more strength, coordination, control and stamina for writing and illustration.

• Writing, drawing and colouring strengthens the small muscles in your hands and fingers.
• Holding and controlling a pencil takes practice.
• Writers are developing their hand-eye coordination.
• Writers and illustrators learn to apply different amounts of pressure to their pencils.
• Your posture affects your writing and drawing.
• Writers learn how to position their paper effectively.
• Both hands often work together during book making.

👂 Phonological awareness

Teachers who think aloud about the sounds they are putting to paper (stretching phonemes, segmenting words, noticing rhymes and patterns) are providing powerful phonological instruction embedded in a meaningful, purposeful context.

• Words are made up of sounds.
• Sounds can be stretched.
• Sounds can be segmented.
• Sounds can be blended.
• Some words rhyme.
• Some words share initial sounds.
• Words contain syllables.
• Writers listen carefully to the sounds in the words they want to write.
• Writing down sounds requires concentration and practice. If you do it a lot, you don’t have to even think about it.

🔡 Spelling

Spelling can feel abstract and remote to young children when presented as a discrete skill. When a teacher puzzles over a spelling in front of the class (using phonics, drawing on other known words, checking the word wall) spelling becomes a visible, manageable problem-solving activity.

• Writers use known words to help with unknown words.
• Approximating tricky spellings, and putting down all the sounds you can hear in a word, is useful to your readers.
• Spellings can be corrected and changed later.
• Writers use their phonics knowledge.
• Writers learn common spellings over time.
• Writers notice and remember patterns.
• Writers notice word families.
• Some words are irregular and need to be remembered.
• Writers use resources to help them spell.

📝 Sentence construction

Children who have not yet internalised what a sentence is can begin to absorb that understanding simply by watching a teacher make sentences every day. They’ll see their teacher deciding where to start, where to end and how different punctuation marks are used.?!

• Sentences express ideas. One after another.
• Sentences can be short or long.
• Writers use capital letters.
• Writers use end punctuation (full stops, question marks, exclamation marks).
• Writers reread their writing all the time to make sure it reads well for their audience.

📚 Composition

The large-scale decisions about what a text will contain is usually invisible to children who only ever read finished books. A teacher composing in front of their class makes those decisions audible, showing children how writers build meaning across a whole text.

• Stories have different structures.
• Information texts have different structures.
• Stories involve feelings.
• Events unfold over pages.
• Writers choose what happens.
• Writers share facts and explain things to their readers to help them learn new things.

🎭 Narrative understanding

Stories are not arbitrary sequences of events. They are shaped by the logic of human experience (characters who want things, face things, and change). Children who watch a teacher build a story begin to absorb this logic deeply [LINK, LINK].

• Characters have wants and feelings.
• Characters make choices and face challenges.
• Actions have consequences.
• Relationships matter.
• Perspectives differ.
• Life stories can be retold.
• Stories can be realistic.
• Stories can be fantastical.
• Stories can be funny.
• Stories can be sad.
• Stories can be exciting.
• Stories can be surprising.
• Stories can be scary.
• Stories can be gross!

📕 Bookmaking knowledge

Making picturebooks gives young children access to the most developmentally appropriate writing process. They also gain a set of design principles that shape every book they will ever read and write. These are not trivial aesthetic considerations; they are the craft knowledge of the medium.

• Books are designed.
• Page turns matter.
• Illustrations support meaning.
• Images can tell part of the story or explain something really well.
• Covers attract readers.
• Titles are chosen.
• Endpapers exist.
• Size and format affect reading.
• White space matters.
• Text placement matters.

🎨 Artistic understanding

When a teacher illustrates their picturebook, the classroom becomes a studio. Children begin to understand that visual art is not decorative but communicative. The choices an illustrator makes are intentional, revisable and meaningful.

• Illustrations can show emotions.
• Colour creates mood.
• Scale influences meaning.
• Details can support the text.
• Pictures can show information not stated in text.
• Images can create humour.
• Images can create tension.
• Contrasts between text and pictures are possible.

🧠 Metacognition

When a teacher thinks aloud while writing (noticing what is and isn’t working, articulating reasons for choices, revisiting decisions) they are modelling one of the most transferable cognitive skills children can develop: thinking about their thinking.

• Writers think about their writing.
• Writers monitor possible misunderstandings.
• Writers reread and reflect.
• Writers make changes.
• Writers learn from previous experiences.

⚙️ Executive function

Writing is one of the most demanding executive-function tasks that humans regularly perform. Watching a skilled writer manage their attention and focus, and push through difficulties gives children a visible model of how these cognitive processes work.

• Sustained attention and focus really matters.
• Self-control supports writing.
• Book-making can be broken down into small manageable parts.
• Improvement is possible with time and hard work.
• Expertise develops over time.
• Practice matters.
• Learning to write never ends.
• Confidence grows through repeated experience.
• Writing something of quality needs time.

✨ Creativity

When a teacher takes a creative risk (tries an unexpected idea, combines things in a new way, laughs at a strange image that works) children see that creativity is not a gift some people have and others don’t. They can take creative risks too.

• Original and kooky ideas are valued.
• There are multiple ideas that can work.
• Experimentation is exciting.
• Risk-taking is encouraged.
• Unexpected combinations are enjoyable.
• Book-making is ‘play on paper’.

❤️ Emotional development

Writing can be emotional. It involves vulnerability, frustration, pride, and the particular satisfaction of finishing something you’ve made. When a teacher brings genuine emotions to their writing, and names those emotions, they give children a richer vocabulary for their own lives and texts.

• Feelings can be expressed through stories.
• Sharing stories can help us make sense of our experiences.
• Frustration is normal.
• Pride accompanies achievement.
• Persistence leads to feelings of satisfaction.
• Imperfection happens.
• Feedback from your friends and teacher can make you feel amazing.
• Sharing your book with others to see their reactions can be so rewarding and can become addictive!
• It’s OK to be unsure.

🤝 Social learning

Writing in front of children is not a solitary act. It invites children into a collaborative intellectual space where ideas are shared, refined, and built upon together. The classroom becomes a community of writers. Children enter the ‘writing club’.

• Writing can involve collaboration.
• Writers exchange ideas.
• Writers listen to their readers.
• Different viewpoints enrich stories.
• Writing communities create their own writing culture.
• Other people can influence our book making.
• Books are made for readers. Books are made to be read and performed. Books are olive branches that allow us to make and share meaning with others. Books bring people together.

🔄 Reading–writing reciprocity

Reading and writing are not completely separate subjects. Writers are readers and readers can be writers. A teacher who makes this relationship explicit (reading and discussing mentor texts, noticing what an author has done, borrowing an idea) demonstrates one of the most important truths about literacy.

• Reading and writing are connected.
• Writers are readers.
• The books we read can influence the books we make.
• Authors study other authors.
• Vocabulary from reading supports our writing.
• Reading provides models.
• Writing deepens reading comprehension.
• Decoding helps with encoding.

🏭 Knowledge about publishing

Children who understand that books go through stages have a more accurate and empowering model of what making a book involves.

• Books go through stages.
• Drafts precede final versions.
• Authors revise.
• Editors exist.
• Books reach audiences.
• Authors receive responses from their fans.
• Books circulate within communities.

🌍 Cultural understanding

Stories carry cultures. When a teacher writes stories that reflect diverse experiences and voices, and invites children’s own stories into the classroom, they communicate something fundamental about whose knowledge and whose life is worth writing about [LINK and LINK].

• Stories and information texts reflect cultures.
• Stories and information texts preserve traditions.
• People’s languages and dialects are valuable.
• Diverse experiences deserve representation.
• Reading people’s books can increase our understanding of them.
• Making books shapes children’s identities.
• Making books builds belonging.

🔢 Scientific and mathematical concepts embedded in bookmaking

The making of a picturebook is, among other things, an exercise in applied mathematics and scientific thinking.

• Sequencing.
• Pattern recognition.
• Classification.
• Comparison.
• Measurement.
• Spatial relationships.
• Position and direction.
• Cause and effect.
• Prediction.
• Observation.
• Recording information.
• Counting pages.
• Ordering events.
• Estimating space.
• Symmetry and shape.
• Size relationships.

The biggest learning of all

At the heart of all of this is something simpler and more important than any of the individual categories above. When a Nursery or Reception teacher sits down and writes in front of their class (daily, purposefully, and with genuine engagement) children learn something that no worksheet or workbook can teach them:

Books are not mysterious objects created elsewhere by unknown experts. They are made by ordinary people through thought, talk, drawing, revision, persistence and joy. I can be an author and illustrator too.

🏫 Practical classroom takeaways

• Write in front of your class daily [LINK].
• Make picturebooks. The bookmaking approach is the most developmentally appropriate writing process for the youngest of writers [LINK].
• Invite children into the process. Ask for ideas, take suggestions, read back and ask if it sounds right. Writing in front of children should be a social act [LINK].
• Talk about being a writer, not just about writing. Use identity language: we’re writers in this class.
• Connect your writing to your reading. Show children mentor texts. Name the authors you are learning from. Show children that reading feeds writing [LINK].
• Celebrate finished work. Share the books you make with your class. Let children see that their teacher’s writing reaches an audience and matters.
• Remember what you are teaching. On any given day, when you sit down and write in front of your class, you may be teaching a writerly habit, a planning technique, an encoding strategy or a craft move. Focus on modelling just one thing [LINK].
• Ask children to book-make too. Immediately after modelling your bit of writing, ask children to go and work on their picturebook too. Make sure children have a daily time to write [LINK].