Cover image of the book mentioned in this post. Cover is medium gray with a thin, white border. Inside, the main title is in orange: Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences. The subtitle is in small, gray, all-caps underneath: An Evidence-Based Approach. The authors' names are in orange at the bottom: Bethann Garramon Merkle & Stephen B. Heard. The cover design includes a barn owl occupying the middle-right third of the image. Behind the owl are three stylized pages of text, rendered as white rectangles with white lines implying text. A few gray squiggles suggest comments/editorial marks on the text.

Adapting mentoring to, and with, the developing writer

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A couple of weeks ago, we offered a tool for calibrating your comments to be relevant and useful for a developing writer you’re working with, depending on the stage of development of a given draft text. But there’s another dimension along which mentoring might (should!) change over time, and that’s the development of the writer.

The topic is far too large for a single post, but to give you a head start, we can recognize two very different components of mentoring that might change as the writer develops:

  1. the way we work with them on a particular piece of writing, and
  2. the way we work with them on their continued development as a writer.

Each should change as a writer builds skill and experience, but today we’ll concentrate on the former Continue reading →

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How to lead a journal club you won’t be embarrassed by later

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One of the jobs facing an early-career scientist, and a developing writer, is to learn what their field’s literature looks like. One of the best tools to that end is the journal club. If you’ve never been part of one, it’s simple: each week, a group agrees on a paper they’ll all read and discuss. (It works best when someone is assigned to lead each week’s discussion.)

As a grad student and postdoc, I took part in, and led, quite a few journal club meetings. I’m pretty embarrassed by them now, and I don’t think I’m alone. If you’re part of a journal club (even more, if you’re leading one), perhaps my experience can help you avoid sharing my embarrassment.* Continue reading →

Cover image of the book mentioned in this post. Cover is medium gray with a thin, white border. Inside, the main title is in orange: Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences. The subtitle is in small, gray, all-caps underneath: An Evidence-Based Approach. The authors' names are in orange at the bottom: Bethann Garramon Merkle & Stephen B. Heard. The cover design includes a barn owl occupying the middle-right third of the image. Behind the owl are three stylized pages of text, rendered as white rectangles with white lines implying text. A few gray squiggles suggest comments/editorial marks on the text.

Three stages of manuscript development – and why they matter to you as a mentor

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When folks find out that Bethann Garramon Merkle and I have written a book called Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-based Approach, they often ask: “What’s your #1 tip?”* As you can imagine, that’s a tough one. Would it be cheating to say “read Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences (and also The Scientist’s Guide to Writing)”? Perhaps – so let’s go with this instead: When you’re commenting on a developing writer’s draft, think hard about the stage of the draft’s development.** (You can think of that draft being from a grad student’s thesis, or an undergraduate’s term paper***, or whatever suits your situation best.)

 To make this advice more useful, let’s unpack it a bit – thinking both about our instincts when we comment on writing, and about the way writers usually produce drafts. Continue reading →

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

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Ok, we’re seriously excited – not for tonight’s fireworks, but 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, see the bottom of the post for ordering links.

So why might you want this book? Continue reading →

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Latin Names for Gardeners, Part 4: Four major themes for plant names

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I often write articles for the newsletter of our local Botanic Garden. Recently, it’s been a 4-part series (so far) on Latin names, intended for gardeners who don’t necessarily have any background in biology (or Latin). If you’re a gardener, or if you know one, the series may be of special interest; otherwise, you can think of this as something light for the holidays.

In the first three parts of this series I’ve explained why we use “Latin” names for plants, why calling them “Latin” names is a bit misleading, and who gets to give a plant its Latin name. Today, in Part 4, I’ll tackle the names themselves. When you coin a plant’s Latin name, what can that name be and what can it mean? And what kinds of names are the most common?

The short answer to “what can that name be” is “almost anything”. Continue reading →

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Latin Names for Gardeners, Part 3: Who gives a plant its name?

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I often write articles for the newsletter of our local Botanic Garden. Recently, it’s been a 4-part series (so far) on Latin names, intended for gardeners who don’t necessarily have any background in biology (or Latin). If you’re a gardener, or if you know one, the series may be of special interest; otherwise, you can think of this as something light for the holidays.

In the first two parts of this series I’ve explained why we use “Latin” names for plants,  and why calling them “Latin” names is a bit misleading. Today, a different question: where does a Latin name come from? Who gives a plant its name?

The simple answer is “whoever discovers it” – but like most simple answers, that misses some really interesting detail. What does it mean to “discover” a plant? Continue reading →

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Latin Names for Gardeners, Part 2: Latin names aren’t really Latin (they’re much more interesting than that)

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I often write articles for the newsletter of our local Botanic Garden. Recently, it’s been a 4-part series (so far) on Latin names, intended for gardeners who don’t necessarily have any background in biology (or Latin). If you’re a gardener, or if you know one, the series may be of special interest; otherwise, you can think of this as something light for the holidays.

In the first part of this series I explained why it is that scientists, and many gardeners, use the Latin names of plants rather than the common names that are (often) simpler and more familiar. Now I have a confession to make: although I call them “Latin” names, and almost everyone does, Latin names aren’t Latin. Or at least, they needn’t be; and that makes them much more interesting. Continue reading →

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Latin Names for Gardeners, Part 1: Why Latin names?

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I often write articles for the newsletter of our local Botanic Garden. Recently, it’s been a 4-part series (so far) on Latin names, intended for gardeners who don’t necessarily have any background in biology (or Latin). If you’re a gardener, or if you know one, the series may be of special interest; otherwise, you can think of this as something light for the holidays.

Whenever it’s gardening season where you are, this will probably sound familiar: you’ve had a busy morning pulling Taraxacum officinale from amongst your Lactuca sativa; but now you need to thin your patch of Alcea rosea to make room for some new acquisitions. Or – in English – you’ve pulled dandelions from your lettuce, and now you need to thin your hollyhocks. Those English names (or “common names”) are easier to say and to spell, so why do scientists use the more cumbersome “Latin” (or “scientific”) ones? And why might you want to, as well? Continue reading →

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My far-too-late discovery of “science studies”

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Warning: somewhat more technical than usual, but you can skip ahead when you need to.

Did you know there’s a scholarly field called “science studies”?  For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t.

Just in case you’re like younger me: science studies is the study of how people do science. And the word “people” is the key one there. People do science, and they do it in historical, cultural, social, and psychological contexts with all the complexity of people doing anything in those contexts. And it matters.

Younger me had a strange (but I think not uncommon) view of how science works. Continue reading →

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Our book is SHIPPING NOW! Here’s an easy stocking stuffer + 5 ideas for what to write on the gift tag ✨

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After some paper supply chain issues that delayed the expected publication date* for Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences, we are THRILLED to confirm that any pre-orders made directly with our publisher — the University of Chicago Press** — are shipping immediately now. Continue reading →