Write Like You Teach Book Discussion: Part 2 √ §
Leverage Skills: Share Your Research with a General Audience
Thursday, March 12, 2026 · 12 - 1 PM
Virtual
Join us for the second of two workshops designed to help you kickstart a writing project for an audience of generalists outside your discipline or outside of academia. In this second session, we’ll discuss Chapters 4-6 of Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience (2025), by James M. Lang.
From the book cover:
“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. … Each chapter of Write Like You Teach ends with writing prompts to help would-be authors 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.”
In the fall, we discussed the first half of the book. Please join us for this session whether or not you attended the previous discussion.
Since the publisher has not made this book available as an unlimited-use ebook, the FDC will purchase individual access codes for e-books for the first 25 people who register for and commit to attending the first session by February 26.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash.
From the book cover:
“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. … Each chapter of Write Like You Teach ends with writing prompts to help would-be authors 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.”
In the fall, we discussed the first half of the book. Please join us for this session whether or not you attended the previous discussion.
Since the publisher has not made this book available as an unlimited-use ebook, the FDC will purchase individual access codes for e-books for the first 25 people who register for and commit to attending the first session by February 26.
Please click "Going Virtually" below to reserve your seat for this
session, and we will send you a Google calendar invitation with a WebEx
link one hour before the session. If you register less than an hour
before the session, you will receive the WebEx link when you register.
Please email fdc@umbc.edu
if you have any questions. If you have registered and find that you can
no longer attend, please kindly release your spot so that others may
attend.
√ Counts toward the ALIT Certificate
§ Counts toward the INNOVATE Certificate
§ Counts toward the INNOVATE Certificate