If you think back to your own experiences with learning to write in a formal setting, chances are that writing and literary study are tied together in your memories. There’s a rich tradition of using literature to teach writing, and in many ways, it makes a lot of sense. After all, if these stories, poems, and novels are great enough to have captured hearts and minds (sometimes across generations, cultures, and languages), the writing must be worth emulating. Why wouldn’t we want our students to learn to write like the greatest writers out there?

The problem with using literature to teach writing is in its limitations. Literature is one way to teach some kinds of writing, but some students don’t respond as well to literature as others, and the association of learning to write with poetry, fiction, and plays can muddy the waters for learners who struggle with or just don’t enjoy that type of reading.

Nonfiction writing is a different type of writing than literary expression, and it also requires a different type of reading. Often, you can spot preferences for different kinds of reading early in a child’s personal development. If you’ve got a kid who is never happier than when she’s devouring all of the facts she can find about dinosaurs or one who can recite the entire periodic table and the year each element was discovered from memory, chances are that you’ve got a kid who enjoys nonfiction reading.

Reading and writing are not really separate processes even though we’ve gotten into the habit over the past several decades of teaching them that way. Reading and writing are parts of a cyclical whole that is more broadly understood as rhetorical processing. Just as you can’t really separate speaking and listening or creating art and observing the world, there is no clear line between reading and writing. We read to learn and gather information and then we write to share and reflect on that information in an ongoing loop. We jump back and forth between receiving and transmitting information at all points in the process. That’s the messy nature of creating new ideas.

All of that means that learning to write is easiest when reading something that’s interesting to you. Great works of literature are fantastic ways to learn to write . . . as long as you think that great work of literature is, well, great. If you’ve encountered a learner who finds poetry and literary analysis dull or hard to follow, then it’s probably to both the learner’s and the educator’s advantage not to try to shoehorn a love of literature on top of learning the skill of writing. Learning to read (and hopefully at least appreciate if not eventually like) literature is an important and worthwhile endeavor, but if the reading itself has become a cognitive and motivational battle, learning to write can become unnecessarily difficult by association.

Some have recognized this difficulty and, in an attempt to make the nuts and bolts of writing “easier” to understand, have completely decoupled writing from reading altogether. Instead of reading and responding to ideas, students are asked to do countless grammar drills and write “perfect” sentences or paragraphs without any context or intrinsic motivation for expression. This kind of writing instruction is often repetitive, tedious, and (most importantly) ineffective.