Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience

This engaging guide offers practical advice to teachers on how to utilize their existing classroom skills to become more effective public writers.

After years spent cultivating their expertise and passion for a subject, scholars are uniquely positioned to write great books. Yet, accustomed to writing for an audience of their peers, many scholars find it challenging to adapt their writing to a style that is accessible and engaging to the general public. James M. Lang argues that academics are regularly called on to pitch their research to a general audience: their undergraduates. If only there were a way to translate the skills they use in the classroom into their writing. . . .

In Write Like You Teach, Lang--a veteran writer and teacher--distills the elements of good classroom teaching into guidelines for writing for a general audience. He encourages authors to pay attention to how their readers learn and to embrace exploration, experimentation, and creativity in their writing. Lang asks his readers to consider the questions that all great teachers ask themselves: How will I get the attention of my students? How do I make them curious about the subject? What stories or examples will illustrate the more difficult concepts or theories in the course? When will I pause in the class and give students a break from hard thinking? What will I do at the end of the class to remind students about my key messages and leave them wanting to know more?

Write Like You Teach includes examples from successful writers and useful anecdotes from Lang’s own classroom and writing career. Indeed, Lang takes his own advice to heart: like a good teacher, he varies the form of each chapter, making sure to introduce some surprises to keep the reader engaged. Each chapter ends with writing prompts to help readers practice their newly acquired skills, and an appendix provides additional advice on publishing and promoting one’s work. Teachers who follow Lang’s suggestions will find new ways to connect with their readers--and like any good student, they will never approach writing the same way again.

James M. Lang is a professor of the practice in the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame and an emeritus professor of English at Assumption University. He writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and he is the author of six books, most recently Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty.