This study investigated the effect of genre-oriented translation-based instruction on EFL writing. Many Korean university students are interested in learning English, enhanced by translating drama, cartoons, and children’s storybooks. However, when they engage in these activities, they feel difficulty even if the texts seem simple. This is because the translation process requires not just language competence but also different textual, rhetorical, and social aspects involved in particular genres. In this study, a genre-oriented translation-based writing workshop held for 23 university students is analyzed. A combination of research methods including a pre-test, a workshop, a posttest, survey, and interviews was utilized. This paper discusses first, how genre-oriented noticing helps to raise learners’ awareness of discourse conventions; second, how a translation-based workshop affects the use of learners’ lexico-grammatical patterns, rhetorical patterns, and formality patterns in writing; and third, how an analysis of qualitative data showed there are two categories of genre knowledge that the participants can perceive as easy or difficult. Further implications for the use of text genre knowledge are also discussed.