Organizing writing instruction around genres rather than rhetorical modes can be a highly effective and engaging preparation for students' academic and professional writing needs. The teaching/learning cycle (TLC) is a highly scaffolded curriculum model for teaching target written genres. In the TLC, the organization of and linguistic choices in a genre are made explicit to learners through analysis of mentor texts (deconstruction), following which teachers and students together compose a new text in the target genre (joint construction), and only then do students write their own texts (independent construction). The authors describe how they implemented the TLC in a high-intermediate intensive course in English as a second language by redesigning traditional five-paragraph essay assignments into meaningful genre instruction. Examples discussed include online product reviews, professional emails, and restaurant reviews. The key stage of the TLC, teacher-led, whole-class collaborative writing, is shown to promote the development of language and writing skills by making linguistic, rhetorical, and strategic choices visible. As a result, students appear to internalize language they have negotiated in the joint construction and transfer their learning to subsequent independent writing. The authors conclude with implications of genre-based pedagogy for writing instruction in different educational contexts.