Disappointed that the use of the "PEEL" writing scaffold had led her Year 11 students to write some rather dreary essays, Claire Simmonds reflected that a lack of specific training on historical writing might be to blame. Drawing on genre theory and the work of the history teaching community, Simmonds attempted to theorise the discipline-specific characteristics of "historical" writing. In this article, Simmonds explores how her teaching of writing processes, which draw on syntax and lexis in a manner typically associated with English as an Additional Language, can help pupils to produce more sophisticated written explanations.