Blog – How reading for pleasure will lead to writing that is a pleasure to read

Last week,

, I shared one of the issues raised by Pie Corbett at our recent Festival of Literature at the University of Wolverhampton: that reading for pleasure seems to be being taken away from children by the looming spectre of phonics. It need not be like that.

It need not be like that – and it mustn't if we wish to make our children good writers.

Pie's concerns, which I share, are that the love of reading – the pure joy of opening a new book, of immersing yourself in a new world, sharing the experiences of new characters, seeing the author's vision in all its glory behind your eyelids rather than the pallid version created by a director who doesn't share your concept of that world – this love seems to be being lost in the race to tick boxes.

Of course understanding how words work is important – if you cannot work out what a word says then you cannot read anything, let alone with any pleasure – but it is not mere words that create writing. It is sentences that pierce the brain, that tear the heart, that profoundly move us.

Writing needs to be seen as an art form – not mere wordcrafting.

We have favourite pictures – not brushstrokes or effects. We have favourite pieces of music: no-one exclaims "What a wonderful E flat!"

So with writing – and reading – where there is poetry and writing that soothes us, angers us, excites us, inspires us – it is not the use of an individual word that does so, it is the way that words are put together, crossed out, recomposed, crafted as a whole that allows us to see the author's vision.

Through engaging children with the right literature, through exposing them to a language-rich environment and curriculum, we as teachers hope to nurture these young readers into creative and expressive writers. If a child loves reading then their writing can draw on an inexhaustible source of inspiration. They can go to their favourite authors and books for ideas, for sentences, for modes of thought and ways of writing that those who do not read cannot draw upon.

If we want our children to be articulate, imaginative and stimulating in their writing – and why should we settle for anything less? – then we need to accept the challenge to get them to be stimulated by their reading.

In the best schools, where writing is consistently judged to be 'Outstanding', they have fought and won this battle against reading being seen as boring.

Every child should have the opportunity to be allowed to be articulate, and that means giving every child the vocabulary with which to be so. Reading quality literature will grant them both that vocabulary and the modes of using it.

It is our hope that the primary teacher trainees that we are sending into schools for their final placements before qualification will not only teach the children the phonic skills that they rightly need to know in order to correctly create the words they wish to use, but also the ways to use the words they read and those they write to create their own stories, using the majestic sweep and flow of language to inspire their own readers.