Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and proposals. There has not been much research on why and how we include writing in physics lab classes, and instructors may incorporate writing for a variety of reasons. Through a broader study of multiweek projects in advanced lab classes, we have developed a framework for thinking about and understanding the role of writing in lab classes. This framework defines and describes the breadth of goals for incorporating writing in lab classes, and is a tool we can use to begin to understand why, and subsequently how, we teach scientific writing in physics.