Super Appendix!
Resources for Writing Teachers & Mentors

These resources are aimed primarily at teachers or mentors, mostly but not exclusively of writing. Few of these are specific to science, and most emphasize the undergraduate classroom simply because that gives them the largest market. You can almost always extrapolate to other mentorship

situations.

The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching

Terry McGlynn (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

McGlynn tackles undergraduate teaching in general, but much of what he has to say is relevant to teaching writing. He covers construction of a syllabus, methods for classroom teaching and behavior for teachers, assigning and assessing assignments and exams, online teaching, and more. Empathy and respect for students is a major emphasis. While McGlynn’s advice is underpinned by peer-reviewed literature in the scholarship of teaching and learning, it’s delivered plainly, as one scientist to another, and builds on his direct experience in science classrooms.

* Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom

John C. Bean and Dan Melzer (Jossey-Bass, 2021)

This is the evidence-based guide to mentoring writing in the undergraduate classroom. While it works from a deep grounding in writing studies and in rhetoric and composition, it’s approachable and addresses a wide range of disciplines (including the sciences). It covers everything from designing a course, setting expectations, assessment, and giving feedback on writing assignments to student-forward approaches such as small-group workshops and peer review. Plus it can be sampled to address specific issues without requiring a full read-through.

Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

Kevin M. Gannon (West Virginia University Press, 2020)

This book is a brief, valuable, and forward-looking discussion of what makes teaching so hard, and how you can pick your battles in ways that makes teaching more effective and meaningful.

* Assessing the Teaching of Writing: Twenty-First Century Trends and Technologies

edited by Amy Dayton (Utah State University Press, 2015)

While we didn’t have room to spend much time on this in the book (except in the brief afterword), you might be reasonably concerned that you’re going to get pushback as you adjust how you teach scientific writing. You’re working for change, which a lot of people instinctively resist (students and colleagues alike). It will help to have a concrete plan for how you’re going to document and assess the efficacy of your shifts in teaching. This book provides ideas for how to do that in ways that can be legible to students, colleagues, and administrators.

Happier Hour: How to Spend Your Time for a Better, More Meaningful Life

Cassie Holmes (Penguin Life, 2024)

While this one might seem tangential, it’s quite possible that you’re mentoring writing in a setting where virtually any other activity is more highly valued. Even at a primarily undergraduate institution, you may find that the R1 academic paradigm seeps in (this is calibrated to prioritize research productivity; the term comes from usage in the United States). If caring about things like teaching makes you an outlier, you’ll need to articulate your own priorities and the satisfaction you derive from being a good teacher and mentor. This book and Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope (above) make a good set to help you with that, even in a publish-or-perish environment.

Minds Made for Stories: How We Really Read and Write Informational and Persuasive

Thomas Newkirk (Heinemann, 2014)

This book is a valuable resource for anyone supporting developing writers who would like to enhance the persuasive dimensions of their writing. Newkirk tackles many of the standard assumptions about academic writing, then provides mentors with specific reframes that can be used in the classroom. (While grant proposals, job applications, and the like are explicitly persuasive, all successful academic writing relies on persuasion. Understanding this can afford significant growth to writers.)

* Teaching Science Students to Communicate: A Practical Guide

edited by Susan Rowland and Louise Kuchel (Springer, 2023)

This edited collection is jam-packed with evidence-based lesson plans you can use in planning a scicomm assignment or course. It has numerous activities to provide practice in writing and in complementary skills. For example, Bethann has a chapter in this book that we’ve cited several times—it deals with helping students plan, manage, and complete a major, semester-long communication project. The process she details can be readily used to help new students think through a complex, multistage writing project like a thesis or peer-reviewed manuscript.

They Say / I Say

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (W. W. Norton, 2021)

This book breaks down a lot of the typical academic-writing “moves”—rhetorical strategies such as hedging, disagreeing tactfully, articulating a need for a specific research question, etc. Technically, the book is written for developing writers, but we listed it here because it’s also an enormously helpful guidebook for mentors: it provides you with word-for-word templates and the vocabulary you need to take your instincts around writing and turn them into concrete examples and rationales to share with developing writers.

Why Students Resist Learning: A Practical Model for Understanding and Helping Students

edited by Anton O. Tolman and Janine Kremling (Routledge, 2016)

This book examines reasons why students resist active learning—which is what you’ll be asking them to do if you follow the advice in this book. If you’re aware of the evolutionary, social, and systemic reasons why students resist or struggle to do what we ask, you can help them without taking their entirely predictable resistance personally.

Writing in the Sciences: Exploring Conventions of Scientific Discourse

Ann M. Penrose and Steven B. Katz (Pearson, 2009)

This book might seem like it might be better as a text for developing writers. But we’ve listed it here because it does some of what our book does: demystifying scientific writing by leveraging the disciplines of rhetoric, composition, linguistics, psychology, sociology, philosophy of science, and science education. (The authors are professors of English who study the rhetoric of science.) If you’re looking for vocabulary and concepts that make explicit what we do as scientific writers, this book is a great starting point.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing

(Parlor Press, 2010–24; https://writingspaces.org/)

This book series is an open-access compendium of peer-reviewed essays on writing, generally intended to be read by undergraduate students. So why are we listing it under “Resources for teachers/mentors”? Because it’s huge (over 100 essays so far); because it covers a lot of ground (from punctuation to rhetoric to peer review to PowerPoint design); and because relatively little of that ground is directly focused on STEM writers or writing. You’ll find it a valuable source of essays you can give to your students, but we think sending students to it directly would leave them overwhelmed.

Both of us write blogs that frequently address writing. We are typically talking to you, but you might also find some gems in our blog that you’ll share with students.

Scientist Sees Squirrel is Steve’s blog, and while it’s not particularly focused (hence its title!), it frequently tackles issues of writing, and of mentoring writing.

School of Good Trouble is Bethann’s blog—and rather like Steve’s, it’s often about writing or mentoring writing; but it ranges pretty far from that, too.

Cult of Pedagogy

While this blog and collection of resources is aimed mainly at K–12 teaching, there are lots of ideas here that can be useful in higher education, too. It’s about teaching in general, so you may want to search on “writing.”

Faculty Focus

This newsletter on teaching in higher education ranges more broadly than writing, but a quick search on “writing” will return lots of advice and resources, from multiple contributors.

Megan McIntyre

McIntyre directs the Sonoma State University Writing Program and has compiled resources and advice sheets for teaching university-level writing. Her resources are particularly strong for course design.

Metawriting

Deanna Mascle is director of the Morehead Writing Project at Morehead State University. She describes herself as a writing evangelist, but it would be just as accurate to think of her as a teaching-writing evangelist. Posts tend to be short and focused on a particular idea for a writing exercise or writing pedagogy practice.