I've been teaching HSIE for over twenty years. I know how to teach content. I can walk a Year 8 class through geomorphic processes, or take a Year 10 through the significance of the 1967 Referendum, and by the end of the lesson most of them understand it.
What I've been far less deliberate about is teaching them how to write it.
Not assigning writing. Teaching it. There's a difference, and the new syllabuses, Geography 7-10 (2024) and History 7-10 (2024), make that difference mandatory from 2027. Which means the planning you do this year and next is where it gets decided.
Every focus area in the new Geography syllabus carries a "Create written texts to..." instruction. Every depth study in the new History syllabus does the same. Both follow Recommendation 2 of NESA's 2018 report, Teaching Writing: Report of the Thematic Review of Writing, which told NESA to "clarify and strengthen writing content in syllabus documents," and both align the result to the explicit writing content in English K-10 (2022). The Geography syllabus frames the goal as "word consciousness and precise use of subject-specific terminology."
Writing is now syllabus content. Not a general capability, not a literacy strategy. Content, the same way fieldwork is content and outcome-mapped knowledge is content.
That changes what planning has to do.
What "writing as content" actually means in the classroom
Most of us, when we see "Create written texts to describe and explain geomorphic processes" (the Geography Stage 4 instruction for Landscapes and landforms), read it as a task type. Assign an extended response, mark it against the communicating outcome, done.
That's not enough anymore. The syllabus is asking you to teach the writing, not just set it. So what, specifically, needs teaching?
Two things sit at the heart of it.
First: the writing mechanics nobody named for us
Geography and History teachers have almost never been asked to name these explicitly. Take nominalisation, the most useful example in HSIE writing. Nominalisation is when you turn a verb or adjective into a noun. "Erode" becomes "erosion." "Colonise" becomes "colonisation." "Significant" becomes "significance."
This matters because subject-specific writing in both subjects depends on it. Compare two sentences a Year 8 might write about geomorphic processes:
Waves hit the cliff and it erodes and then eventually it collapses.
Wave action causes the progressive erosion of cliff faces, leading to collapse.
The second sentence isn't just more formal. It's doing something cognitively different. The student has taken a process (waves hitting) and turned it into a noun (wave action), which lets them attach a verb of consequence (causes) to a noun of outcome (erosion). That's the sentence structure that earns marks in Geography.
Here's the same mechanic in History. A Year 8 writing about the Myall Creek Massacre might produce this:
The settlers killed Aboriginal Peoples at Myall Creek and this affected how they were treated.
The Myall Creek Massacre exposed the violent dispossession of Aboriginal Peoples under colonial expansion and prompted limited but significant legal consequences.
The second sentence nominalises "dispossession" (turning the act of dispossessing into a concept) and "expansion" (turning the process of expanding into a historical force). That compression lets the student attach an evaluative verb, "exposed," "prompted," and make a historical claim instead of just retelling a sequence. It's the difference between narration and analysis at the sentence level.
Here's the problem: most Geography and History teachers don't know this is called nominalisation. We recognise Band 6 writing when we see it. We mark down the first sentence and reward the second. We write "more sophisticated language" in the margin. What we rarely do is teach the student the move they need to make, because nobody taught us to name it.
The new syllabuses are asking us to fix that.
Second: the directive verb lift
This is where the new syllabuses get sharp. Look at what happens to the writing instruction as students move from Stage 4 to Stage 5, and what happens to the outcomes alongside it.
In Geography, Stage 4 students communicate geographical information (GE4-COM-01). Stage 5 students select and apply concepts and terminology (GE5-COM-01). "Selects" is doing real work there. It implies discrimination, not just use.
In History, the writing instruction lifts the same way: Stage 4 students create written texts to explain historical concepts, Stage 5 students create written texts to analyse them. The communicating outcome mirrors it: Stage 4 "communicates historical ideas," Stage 5 "communicates historical arguments." Explanation and analysis aren't the same cognitive task, and they need different sentence-level skills to pull off.
An explanation answers how or why. It describes a mechanism. A Year 8 explaining the causes of colonisation builds a causal chain: this happened, which led to this, because of this.
An analysis answers to what extent, with what significance, with what contradictions or limitations. A Year 10 analysing the significance of the 1967 Referendum isn't just recounting what it changed. They're weighing its impact, naming what it didn't achieve, positioning it inside a larger argument. That needs writing at the clause level: concession structures ("while the referendum delivered constitutional change, it did not..."), evaluative language ("the most significant consequence was..."), and argument signposting ("this suggests that...").
If we set Year 10 analysis tasks but never teach students how to write an analytical sentence, not an essay, a sentence, we're marking them down for a skill gap we created.
What this means for programs and assessment
Three practical things. The most important one first.
The verb in the writing instruction is the verb in the outcome, which is the verb in the marking criteria. If the focus area says "explain," your rubric descriptors should describe what explanation looks like at each quality level at the sentence and paragraph level, not just at the content level. If it says "analyse," your top band should describe what analytical writing actually looks like. Not "analyses with sophistication," which is circular and no student can use it, but "constructs a sustained argument, uses evidence to support and qualify claims, and acknowledges complexity or contradiction."
Second, the "Thinking and working geographically" opener that the new Geography syllabus requires at the start of every focus area now needs to include the writing text type for that focus area. Name it. Tell students at the start of the unit what kind of writing they'll produce and what it looks like at the sentence level.
Third, in History, the Stage 4 to Stage 5 source-skill progression runs in parallel with the writing progression. Stage 4 ends at the value and limitations of sources; Stage 5 moves to evaluating their reliability for a specific inquiry. A Stage 5 source task isn't just asking students to identify bias. It's asking them to build an evaluative argument from that evidence. The writing instruction and the inquiry skill are the same task. Plan them together.
That's the shift. Writing as content means we teach the moves, not just set the task.
A note on MarkMate
This is the kind of writing MarkMate is built to support. It marks student writing against the rubric verb for the task, explain at Stage 4, analyse at Stage 5, and flags where a paragraph retells instead of arguing, sentence by sentence, before it reaches you.
But the tool checks the writing. It doesn't teach the move. Naming nominalisation, modelling the analytical sentence, showing a class what "select and apply" looks like in their own paragraphs, that part is still ours. The syllabus just made it our job to do it on purpose.
So if you're rewriting a unit this year, start with one question: what's the first writing text type you'd name for it?
