Books! The New Book (on Writing) and the Book-In-Progress (on Reading)
A break in our regularly-scheduled programming to celebrate the newly published book--and announce the next one.
For the past ten years, ever since the publication of Small Teaching, May has been the most challenging month of the year for me. Many colleges and universities host teaching-focused, end-of-year events for their faculty, and I get asked frequently to keynote or provide workshops at those events. Not only am I frequently on the road in May, which is exhausting enough, but the “month” for these celebrations lasts from late April until early June. I came home from my final event on Monday afternoon and felt like a deflated balloon—albeit a grateful one, because I had met so many interesting people and had wonderful experiences on every campus. But when I plopped myself on the couch after dinner on Monday evening, I had nothing left in body and brain.
I am now recovering my wits enough to tackle all of the work that I neglected in my long May, and the first order of business is a post dedicated to my recently published book, even though publication day came and went a month ago. It seems a little late to “announce” the book, so let me formally celebrate it here: Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, was published by the University of Chicago Press on May 9, 2025. I’m happy about it. You should read it.
Throughout the few years it took to write this book, and then while I was promoting its ideas over the past year in pre-publication workshops, I have found that most people easily grasp the book’s premise from the title: we can reach more readers when we write like teachers. Readers come to nonfiction reading just like students come into classrooms: hoping to learn something new. If you are a teacher, you know how to help people learn new things. The book presents specific ways teachers can translate good course design and classroom strategies into good writing strategies, especially in books and essays aimed at more public audiences.
The bulk of the book presents writing practices that have teacherly equivalents, with six chapters on everything from drafting learning objectives for a book project to crafting what I call “invitational prose.” The final section of the book provides an insider summary of how to guide a manuscript through its full publication life cycle, from submission and editing to promotion of a newly published book. For that 45-page appendix, I drew from my experiences as a writer and a book series editor, as well as supplementing my perspective with advice from essential guides like Bill Germano and Jane Friedman.
I hope academics, as well as teachers and experts of any stripe, will read the Write Like You Teach and feel energized and empowered to share their research and ideas with new audiences. Because, folks, we need that right now. The shit show of the current US political administration, when it comes to discrediting higher education and the value of knowledge and expertise, has elevated the need for knowledgeable people to speak directly to public audiences about why our work matters. So if you ever wanted to see your ideas move beyond the hallways of your department or your academic conference, I hope you will find the book’s premise an enabling one.
Thanks to the many connections I have made in the academic world over the past two decades, I have had many opportunities to speak about the new book since publication day. I recommend the following starting places if you want a preview of the book’s ideas before you pull the trigger:
I am writing a three-part series on the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which began in May with my argument that we can use the idea of learning objectives, like the ones you can find on any college syllabus, to sharpen the focus of our writing projects.
Over at Inside Higher Ed, John Warner, whose new book More Than Words is gaining all of the recognition and plaudits it deserves, interviewed me about my book. This interview took a personal turn; I think it was the first time I admitted to myself that I don’t quite enjoy writing as much as I did when I was a more single-minded person.
On the Designed for Learning podcast, which I host for the University of Notre Dame, my colleague Kristi Rudenga put me in the podcast guest’s chair for a thirty-minute conversation about the book.
In the journal Teaching Sociology, Erin Heinz provides the first published review of the book (spoiler alert: she liked it).
There you have it—my self-promotional post on my new book.
But wait—there’s more!
The post-May deflation of the Jim Lang balloon this year was an especially intense one, because while I was bopping from one hotel room and campus auditorium to one another, I was also in the midst of negotiating with W.W. Norton to publish my next book, which will focus on . . . reading. You might be thinking how smart it was to follow up a book on writing with a book on reading, almost like I was following some larger vision, like a five-year plan for my next two books.
Making my way through the world without five-year plans and larger visions is one of my life skills. Instead, this one kind of plopped into my lap, when an editor at Norton reached out to me, on the recommendation of an editor I had worked with before, to see whether I would consider writing about a book on the much-reported decline of reading both in schools and in the world. I dithered for a month or two about this unearned opportunity, largely because I have never felt drawn to writing books that spell out prophecies of doom. But in the end, after quite a few drafts of a proposal, I found my way to a vision of the book has me energized and ready to write.
You will, of course, see ideas for that book being developed in this space over the next year or two, but I can promise you three things about it:
It will analyze our conversations about the decline of reading, both acknowledging the reality of this decline and reflecting upon the discourse itself.
It will argue that reading still matters, as it always has. Those who diminish its power and place in a technological world have lost of sight of the essential contributions it makes to our thinking, our learning, and our well-being.
It will shine lights on the many places were reading is re-emerging, finding its way back into people’s lives after years of neglect, especially among younger people. The book will offer hope for reading’s future.
You can bet that I will bring much passion to an argument about the power of reading. Over the course of two decades as an English professor, I saw how reading inspired and guided the lives of many students, just as it inspired and guided my own life. I have also seen how a commitment to reading can cultivate the well-being that so many of us feel like we have lost. It thus breaks my heart to hear people say that they don’t read as much they used to, and it frustrates me to hear well-meaning educators or tech-bros dismiss reading just as one more way to give or get information, like a video or an infographic.
What I want to say to both of these groups is . . . well, actually, let me start writing.
Congratulations on your newly published book! 🥳 I’m looking forward to reading it, and eager to see/read more about your next one, too. Writing and reading, what a wonderful combination! 🖤🤍