Michael Rosen, writer, performer, broadcaster and teacher, has been teaching in universities since 1994. He has an MA in Children's Literature from Reading University and a PhD from the University of North London. The father of five children, he discusses in this article his views on Genre Theory, and how he believes it has slipped between the pages of literacy strategies in the UK, beginning in 1987 when Genre Theory was being discussed all around the teachers' conferences. Rosen observes that parents, teachers and children today are still deeply engaged in genres, arguing that children spend massive amounts of time in schools being taught writing according to certain schemes, which many theorists believed should have saved the world. He notes the failure of these prescribed schemes to uplift the masses and re-possess the dispossessed mainly because they did not address two key issues: (1) How power works in classrooms and schools; and (2) How written language is best acquired. Rosen writes that he sees language in schools constantly being pulled apart and categorized as "verb", or "metaphor". He closes by wondering: What if we took the attitude that language can be investigated like any other phenomenon? What if we were to do what sociolinguists do, and collect data on how people in a school (at all levels) use language, then discuss why that happens? What if we were to look at things like newspapers or comics and see if we can come up with categories for how language is being used differently from one part of society to another? Why? How?"