While the “science of reading” propelled a wave of state policies that have brought sweeping changes to classrooms across the country, reading’s counterpart, writing, hasn’t garnered nearly as much attention in legislation or statewide initiatives.
In some parts of the country, that might be changing.
Last month, the New Hampshire education department was awarded an $8.7 million federal grant to support evidence-based writing instruction in grades K-8 across the state. Arizona received a similar $11.5 million grant last year for teacher training in writing instruction, which was expected to reach more than 75 elementary schools.
More attention to writing could pay dividends, said Steve Graham, a professor at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation who studies writing instruction.
Reading and writing are reciprocal skills: Getting better at one helps students get better at the other. But writing has historically been overlooked in reading reform movements, Graham said.
Still, he cautioned that any state efforts to prioritize writing need to be carefully connected to existing science of reading efforts, not just layered on top as one more new initiative.
“What you don’t often see is careful integration,” he said.
Foundational skills and long-form writing are both important
Writing gets a mention in science of reading laws in 39 states, but it’s not a main focus in most, according to an analysis of reading legislation from the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.
Kentucky is a notable exception, the analysis highlights, where the state’s flagship reading law passed in 2022 emphasizes writing throughout; requires the state to provide resources for students “exhibiting characteristics of dysgraphia,” a writing-related learning disability; and states that curriculum and training should cover “connections between writing and reading acquisition.”
Some individual districts and schools have homed in on writing, too.
Taryn Rawson, the principal at Goldrick Elementary in Denver, said tackling writing was a natural next step after focusing on foundational reading skills and shifting the school’s approach to teaching reading comprehension.
“The writing instruction in our [reading curriculum] isn’t enough, so we’ve got to layer on some additional explicit writing instruction,” she said.
Writing and reading have been historically separated in both education research and classroom practice. The report of the National Reading Panel, the landmark review of reading research published in 2000, didn’t examine writing. Writing also isn’t assessed as frequently as reading, which can make it a lower priority for state and district leaders.
Despite this bifurcation, writing and reading are deeply interrelated, research has found.
And just as in reading, there’s a substantial body of research examining how children become strong writers.
Students need instruction in writing’s foundations, said Graham. At the most basic level, that means practice encoding—writing letters to represent spoken sounds, the inverse of decoding in reading. Research also shows that teaching spelling, handwriting, grammar, and basic sentence construction have positive effects on students’ reading and writing abilities.
Skipping explicit instruction in these foundational skills could “blunt or mitigate the effects” of any large-scale attempt to improve writing, Graham warned.
But students also need time to practice applying those skills in real writing, he said. This should happen while they’re still learning the basics, he added. Students shouldn’t be held back from writing longer compositions because they haven’t mastered certain sentence structures.
What will implementation look like?
In New Hampshire, teachers are watching to see how the state puts the requirement for “evidence-based” writing instruction into practice. (The state education department declined to comment.)
Trish Walton, the president of the New Hampshire Council of Teachers of English, said she was glad to see the state making the subject a priority. “I have seen the focus on writing just get less and less,” said Walton, who retired from teaching middle school English/language arts in June 2025.
The students entering her classroom in the past few years struggled more with grammar skills than those she taught earlier in her career, but they also were less motivated to write in general, Walton said. “There’s less creativity,” she added.
She would like to see more time for students to write “for the love of writing,” rather than only writing in response to academic content, such as passages in English class or primary sources in social studies.
It’s important that writing about academic content still be a main focus of instruction, though, said Graham. Dozens of studies show that this approach can make knowledge stick.
If states start to embark on “science of writing” initiatives, they’re likely to encounter some of the same implementation challenges that have plagued science of reading efforts, Graham said.
Interventions that show big gains in controlled experiments often produce smaller results in real school settings where there are resource and time constraints or struggles to get teacher buy-in.
Still, using research-backed approaches is a good starting point for helping students become better writers, he said. “You’ve increased your chances.”
