Great news, y'all!!!! Our new book (“our” meaning me & Steve Heard) has been fully accepted [1] by the University of Chicago Press, and is now headed into production!!!!!!
Given that, I'm writing you with an update...and a request for your opinions about its title.
Context
If you know what I'm talking about, feel free to skip down to the "we need you to help us name the book" section!
If you're new around here, though, you might be asking: “What book!?”
Well, this book is a passion project I've been working on for a couple of years (and dreaming about for nearly a decade). It's tentatively called Helping Students Write in the Sciences: Strategies for Efficient and Effective Mentoring of Developing Writers.
If you teach or mentor scientific writing – undergraduates, grad students or other early-career scientists – then we wrote this book for you. You already know how much work it is to help developing writers with their craft. Whether you're a faculty member, staff person, administrator, or someone beyond academia (e.g., government, industry, nonprofits), you have probably spend untold hours with drafts written by developing writers. You might not be sure whether, even after all that effort, your students/mentees are making progress at mastering the craft. You’d like evidence-based advice for how you could spend less time and effort at writing mentorship, while getting better results. (Of course!)
The good news: there’s help to be had!
The bad news: much of that help is challenging for STEM-trained folks to access. It’s in unfamiliar literature, written with unfamiliar jargon, and often not framed as relevant to STEM settings.
Helping Students Write can be your guide and your interpreter.
We summarize a lot of what’s known about teaching and mentoring developing writers – efficiently and effectively – so you don’t need to spend time in the deep end of the writing-research pool. [2]
Would you like to know more about the content? You’ll find it outlined here. (Note: since I published that post some content has been reorganized, but the topic list is the same.)
Next steps for the book
As you read this, we’re delivering the completed manuscript to University of Chicago Press for copyediting. Book production is complex, so there’s a lot still to be done, including copyediting, cover design, typesetting, indexing, proofreading, and finally printing physical copies. Our best guess right now is that you can have the book in your hands (and we hope you’ll want to) some time in Fall 2025. 🥳
In the meantime, if you’d like to receive occasional updates about the book’s progress, we invite you to sign up for email alerts here.
This week's "How about you?" is:
We need you...👉 to help us name the book!
Titles are hard.
Titles also matter, a lot – they can have a lot to do with whether someone picks up a book or glances past it to the next one on the shelf. So in addition to our working title, we have three alternatives, and we’d like to know what you think.
Here are our four candidate titles:
Helping Students Write in the Sciences: Strategies for Efficient and Effective Mentoring of Developing Writers
You’re Trying Too Hard: An Evidence-based Guide to Saving Your Time While Actually Helping Early Career Writers in the Sciences
Bad Advice About Writing (and How to Ignore It): An Evidence-based Guide to Helping Early Career Writers in the Sciences
Developing Writers in the Sciences: A Mentoring Approach
Please, could you answer just two questions for us, given the description of the book you read in this post’s 3rd and 4th paragraphs?
Which title might tempt you to pick up the book for yourself
0%Helping Students Write in the Sciences
0%You're Trying to Hard
0%Bad Advice about Writing (and How to Ignore It)
0%Developing Writers in the Sciences
Which title might tempt you to give the book to an early career researcher/mentor you know?
Helping Students Write
You're Trying Too Hard
Bad Advice About Writing (and How to Ignore It)
Developing Writers in the Sciences
And, of course, if you have another title suggestion, we encourage you to drop it in the Comments/Replies.
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts!!!
NOTES
[1] In contrast to the peer review process for a journal article or the "pitch an editor" process for getting an article into a magazine, a book (especially a scholarly book like ours) goes through a lot of rounds of review. We had two rounds of a proposal reviewed. Then, we had the whole manuscript read by several beta/early readers. Then our editor read the whole thing and sent it off for another round of reviews. (We probably have had ~10+ reviewers so far.) Then, the book was discussed and accepted by an editorial committee and ultimately an advisory committee. In that process, it was some version of accepted at least 3 times, then formally approved for publication twice! Phew!
[2] Of course, if you do want to swim over where the water is deeper, we’ve got you. We provide extensive footnotes (well, actually endnotes) to connect you with key references in the scholarship of teaching and learning and of writing instruction. You didn’t think we’d pass up an opportunity for footnotes, did you? 🤣🤦♀️
© Stephen Heard and Bethann Garramon Merkle, October 8, 2024