Our title got a "glow up" and it's not even the new year, yet!
About a year ago, I posted some basic information about my new book, coauthored with the marvelous Stephen Heard. As books "grow up," they change and presumably improve. It’s time for an update, because our book is now in production (with the University of Chicago Press, for release in Fall 2025). It has a new title, new organization, and some new content.
So it’s time to tell you more about Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach.[1]
Writing is an enormously important thing for scientists, and thus it’s an enormously important part of what we need to teach our students. Lots of books exist that help people learn to write, creatively, comically, even scientifically (including Steve's first book). While these books absolutely can help a scientist write better, they don't do much to help a scientist teach others to write better.
That’s where Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences comes in. With our book, you can learn to teach and mentor early-career writers more effectively, and more easily too – a double win. The advice and resources we share are relevant for teaching writing in the classroom and also for mentoring writing outside the classroom. So, you can also use our book to support grad students, research undergrads, and early-career colleagues as they develop their writing craft.
So what’s in the book?
Advice, and lots of it, for those who teach or mentor scientific writers. As it happens, scholars have learned a lot about teaching writing effectively and efficiently – but a lot of that knowledge is hard for scientists to access. It’s buried in unfamiliar and challenging-to-read (for us) pedagogical literature, deriving from unfamiliar research approaches and explained using unfamiliar terms.
Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences translates what’s known about writing instruction into straightforward, actionable suggestions that scientists can understand and put to use. If you do want to dig more deeply into the literature, we’ve got you: you can dig into our copious endnotes (you didn’t think we’d miss a chance for asides, did you!?) where we cite and explain key parts of that literature.
Want to know more?
Here’s the Table of Contents, along with bullet-point questions summarizing each chapter.
Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach by Bethann Garramon Merkle and Stephen B. Heard
Introduction. In which we (big surprise) introduce ourselves, and the book. And perhaps more interestingly, we introduce you and your students – or rather, we say something about the backgrounds of people who teach scientific writing, and of the developing writers they teach it to.
Chapter 1. Getting on the same page: Understanding and communicating with the developing writer.
How does diversity in student backgrounds and skills present both challenges and opportunities?
How can you free students from reproducing the worst features of the literature they read?
How can you help students understand why we use the writing conventions we do, and how conventions differ from rules?
How can you bring students to expect mentors who discuss writing rather than instructors who correct writing?
Chapter 2. What learners do with writing – and how to get them there.
Most science undergraduates will never write scientific papers – so what will they write?
How can we teach writing so that students can transfer their skills to the genres they’ll actually write?
What are authentic writing tasks, and how do they help students learn?
How does the science of science communication contribute to all this?
Chapter 3. Efficient, productive writing feedback.
How can you spend less time and effort on writing feedback, while having that feedback help your students more?
What blend of positive and negative feedback is most helpful?
How can you calibrate feedback to the type, stakes, and stage of a particular writing assignment?
Do line edits and detailed comments really help students, or can you facilitate more learning with less detailed feedback?
How can you coach students to self-edit, so they need less of your feedback?
Chapter 4. Writing in the classroom.
What are WAC (writing across the curriculum) and WID (writing in the disciplines), and why should you care?
What kinds of writing-intensive courses are there, and what are their advantages and disadvantages for helping students write?
How can you design a writing-intensive course that will help students make writing progress without working you to exhaustion?
How can you work towards good writing instruction at the department or program level, not just in your own courses?
Chapter 5. Writing outside the classroom.
How can you guide students to the productive behavior they’ll need to tackle the big writing projects typical outside the classroom?
How can you help students understand which features of the scientific literature are useful conventions and which are bad habits to be avoided?
How can you make multiple rounds of revision less painful for you and your students?
How can you help students navigate conflicting advice from multiple mentors?
How can your approach to mentorship change as students gain experience and become your colleagues and coauthors?
Chapter 6. Teaching and mentoring towards independent learning.
What does it mean for a writer to begin learning on their own?
How can you help your students reduce their reliance on you (and on other mentors)?
Chapter 7. Sharing the workload (and the fun).
How can you pull in resources to lighten your load in mentoring writing?
There are dozens of books on writing available – which might your students benefit from reading?
How can you find effective writing exercises to use with your students?
How can you recruit colleagues to help you mentor students in writing? What about campus resources such as writing centers and libraries?
How can you use peer review and other activities to help students learn and grow together?
Chapter 8. Teaching and mentoring the EAL writer.
What kind of challenges are faced by people writing in English as an additional language (EAL)?
What kind of useful advice can you give the EAL writers you mentor?
Is plagiarism an issue of special importance in mentoring EAL writers?
Chapter 9. From pencils to ChatGPT: tools to improve writing, and writers.
What kinds of tools are available to writers, and what’s the difference between a process tool and a text tool?
How can you guide the writers you mentor to use tools of each type effectively?
What about ChatGPT (and related ‘AI’ tools)? Can you guide students towards using AI writing tools effectively and ethically?
Chapter 10. Writing in a broader curriculum.
Can writing instruction be thought of as part of a curriculum rather than merely part of a particular course?
What might writing instruction look like if you could design it to run through an entire degree program or your lab-group training? And what kind of obstacles might you face in doing so?
How might you coordinate writing instruction so mentors and students aren’t always dealing with conflicting advice?
Won’t there still be coordination problems – only now, with advice from those outside the degree program or lab?
Afterword: How do you know you’re doing a good job? And how do you convince others that you are? In which we suggest ways for mentors to think about and track their own growth – and to communicate that growth to others who might be assessing it.
***
Does this sound like a book you could use?
We can’t wait to be able to put copies in your hands!
Look for Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences from the University of Chicago Press in the Fall of 2025. And if you’d like occasional updates as it gets close to release, 👉 you can sign up here. 👈
NOTES
[1] Our working title had been Helping Students Write: Strategies for Mentoring Early Career Writers in the Sciences (and that’s what you’ll see in our earlier posts about the book). Is Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach a better title? Well, we tried some more lively ones, and the Press came up with several more possibilities. Ultimately, they recommended the TMWS title, so here we are. We do agree, though, that the inclusion of “evidence based” in the title points to something really, really important. There are lots of opinions about how to teach writing, and many of them are what Steve calls SOURs (SOURs: Strong Opinions Unmoored from Rationale). I'm not as tactful -- there are simply a lot of people who have specific grammar and style preferences that they present as the rule of law, but they are wrong. There are actually very few hard-and-fast rules when it comes to writing. Even scientific/academic writing. However, there is a lot of evidence about better/good ways to teach or mentor writing. The gap between our great appreciation for parenthetical comments and your possible preference for short, straight-to-the-point sentences and what we should actually be helping developing writers learn is considerable. In our book, we've worked hard help you see that difference and focus on the latter for the good of your students and mentees. To do so, we spent years distilling our experience and the the literature (from Rhetoric and Composition and allied fields), giving you a book whose advice has evidence behind it.
© Stephen Heard and Bethann Garramon Merkle, December 12, 2024.
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