Different theorists have categorised the types of written genres we commonly use in the classroom in different ways. Collerson (1988) suggests a separation into Early genres (labels, observational comment, recount, and narratives) and Factual genres (procedural, reports, explanations, and arguments or exposition). Wing Jan (1991) categorises writing into Factual genres (reports, explanations, procedures, persuasive writing, interviews, surveys, descriptions, biographies, recounts, and narrative information) and Fictional genres (traditional fiction and contemporary modern fiction).

There is, however, a large measure of agreement as to what the main nonfiction genres are, and during our classroom work with teachers we have taken as our model the categories of nonfiction genres identified by the Sydney linguists (Martin & Rothery, 1980). As part of the work of this group, nonfiction texts were collected and analysed, including many examples of students' school scripts. From this they identified six important nonfiction genres which we use in our culture and discovered that in school one of these genres was overwhelmingly predominant.

The six main types of nonfiction genre they identified were:

1. recount
2. report
3. procedure
4. explanation
5. persuasion
6. discussion

It was found that, of these six genres, recount was overwhelmingly the most widely experienced by students in school. Students spend a lot of time telling the story of what they did or found out.

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