Writing tasks are central in the subject of Swedish, and they can be designed in various ways. The variation in design when teachers construct their own writing tasks can be due to differing views of the teaching of writing and exercises in writing. The aim of this work is to investigate how different discourses about writing and learning to write become visible in teachers’ constructions of writing tasks, and whether there are different degrees of steering in the tasks in relation to the discourse(s) to which they can be said to belong. Twelve writing tasks were examined in the study with the aid of Ivanič’s (2004) framework for analysis of discourses about writing and learning to write, and the result shows that the creativity discourse dominates among the tasks and that the sociopolitical discourse is sparsely represented among them. Several tasks have features of more than one discourse and can therefore be called hybrids. The degree of steering by the designer of the task differs between the tasks. In tasks that can be linked to the skills discourse there is usually a high degree of steering of the content, and in tasks that can be linked to the creativity discourse the designer of the task uses a different form of steering with questions which mean that the teacher gains access to personal information about the pupils.