It’s publication day for “Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences"!

Wahooooo!!! Has your pre-order copy already arrived?!

Ok, we’re seriously excited – because after several years of work, our new book is officially published today! That’s right – Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-based Approach is now for real!

It can be in your hands right away (and of course, we think it should be). If you’ve preordered, thank you, and it should be on its way to you; if not, order your copy here!

order your copy!

So why might you want this book?

Well, if you’re active in science, you’ve likely already played some role in mentoring or teaching scientific writers. Perhaps you have a lab full of graduate students or undergraduate researchers. Perhaps you teach an undergraduate course that involves some writing (and perhaps you wish it could involve more, but don’t see how you can manage it). Perhaps you’re a researcher outside the academy who helps train junior team members.

No matter what your situation, you’ve probably discovered two things:

1. mentoring writing is hard, and

2. you haven’t had much preparation for it!

Teaching and Mentoring Writers can help you. The book translates for you a lot of what’s known about teaching writing (from fields we scientists often don’t read, like rhetoric and pedagogy). The book also distills our (mine and Steve’s) own extensive experience supporting developing writers. (For a more detailed view of the contents, see this post from last year.)

We’re really proud of this book. We worked hard to write it [1] and to find it a publishing home (and the University of Chicago Press is just right).

We also learned an enormous amount from the literature and from each other. Especially from each other! This isn’t a book that either of could have written alone. Sometimes each of us was excited to find the other one knew just the right thing for the chapter at hand. Other times we disagreed about something and had to hash that out. Those disagreements were, actually, where we learned the most—believe us, your best collaborator is not someone who always thinks like you.

We can’t wait to hear from readers—from you! We want to know what you find most useful; what you find implausible but are willing to try; what you resist. If you find at least one thing in all three categories, we’ll feel like we’ve done our jobs.

You can order your copy of Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences directly from the publisher [2]. Or, of course, you can order through your local bricks-and-mortar shop!

© Stephen Heard and Bethann Garramon Merkle November 18, 2025

This post was first published on my blog at commnatural.com. © 2025, B.G. Merkle, all rights reserved.

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[1] You can probably guess just how much reading lies behind the ~300 endnotes! Look, if you trust us, you can skip all the endnotes and get our message—that’s why they’re endnotes. But we hope somebody wants to dig deeper and makes good use of the endnotes, because they are packed with information, and it took so much (fun) work to do that packing! We also, ahem, think they are the funniest part of the book (with the index a close second).

[2] At least for a while, using the code UCPNEW at checkout should get you a 30% discount. It will stop working at some point, though, so don’t dawdle!