This chapter focuses on the genres that students are expected to read and write in the secondary school, described in the Sydney School project’s second phase, the Write it Right project. The knowledge realised in these genres is described in terms of three broad semantic tropes: classification, cause-and-effect and evaluation. These semantic themes are exemplified in a range of genres in science and history. The critical resource for building uncommonsense knowledge is then explored – grammatical metaphor. The chapter concludes by presenting the range of written genres from perspectives of categories (typology) and tendencies (topology).